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ElShamah - Reason & Science: Defending ID and the Christian Worldview

Otangelo Grasso: This is my personal virtual library, where i collect information, which leads in my view to the Christian faith, creationism, and Intelligent Design as the best explanation of the origin of the physical Universe, life, biodiversity


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Abiogenesis is mathematically impossible

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1Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Empty Abiogenesis is mathematically impossible Mon Nov 11, 2013 1:47 pm

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Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible

Open questions in prebiotic chemistry to explain the origin of the four basic building blocks of life
The trajectory from a prebiotic synthesis of the basic building blocks of life, to the sophisticated synthesis by cell factories: an unsolved riddle
Mainstream scientific papers confirm indirectly that cells are irreducibly complex and interdependent
Paradoxes in the Origin of Life
Biological Cell factories point overwhelmingly to set up by intelligent design

Abiogenesis? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJblRcgqXk&t=420s

Jack W. Szostak: It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago.
https://www.mrgscience.com/uploads/2/0/7/9/20796234/origin_of_life_sci_am.pdf

Michael Polany: “Pasteur’s claim that any living being comes from another living being (‘omne vivum ex vivo’) continues to fully agree with all experimental data of pre-biotic chemistry”
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/on-the-impossibility-of-abiogenesis/

There's nothing about inert chemicals and physical forces that say we want to get life at the end of the abiogenesis process. Molecules do not have the "drive", they do not "want" to find ways to harness energy and to become more efficient

No researcher has ever tried to build a nano-scaled factory in their laboratory by leaving the raw materials, and waiting for unguided processes to take their course...

Etiology, the science of causes, in regards to the origin of the first living self-replicating cell, the hypothesis that natural, unguided random events were responsible, has led to dead ends, to the constatation that the lack of natural selection produces too unspecific results in a wast, basically limitless chemical space and space of sequence combinations of molecules. Only an intelligent agency with intent and foresight can in principle, select the required biomolecules, inject information in the system, and build the energy generating mechanisms, three things that must occur simultaneously. 

The natural tendency is going from order to disorder
It's much easier to mess things up than to order things, to bring them into a special sequence, or to line them up that bear a special function. That's a general principle that we observe in nature. Imagine taking a new pack of cards they come in in numerical order and when one shuffles them then, of course, they're going to become disordered, and if someone takes a disordered pack of cards and shuffles them and gets an exact order state it's evident there was a magic trick involved. In nature, it is well established that natural states also tend to go from order to disorder. But living cells do the opposite. They take up materials from the environment and transform them into complex specified building blocks of life, and energy in the form of ATP. That is a trend from disorder to order. But all this has nothing to do with thermodynamics, where the order goes to disorder in a closed system, where energy disperses, and ordered systems transform themselves into chaotic states of affairs. Cells in our bodies degrade and die. Heat goes always from hot to cold. In short: The energy in the universe is constant, but the entropy of the universe tends from low to high. The tendency is to go from order to disorder.  

Nils Bohr suggested in a lecture published in Nature “life is consistent with, but underivable from physics and chemistry”
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.171&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Paul Davies & Jeremy England • The Origins of Life: Do we need a new theory for how life began? 25 de jun. de 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IU2ZWrkhg

Jeremy England: The question is what molecules  do when they're bouncing around together in an open system where you have energy and matter constantly flowing through it is you end up having to think in particular about how the matter that's in the system which is what you're interested in that's where the order you're trying to explain is going to occur how that matter receives the energy that's flowing through it and how that impacts how it changes over time
when you have a system an open system where there's some source of energy in its environment or that's driving it that's pushing energy through the system energy is just either motion or the potential for motion that's really the whole concept of energy was invented in newtonian mechanics to explain how things can cause each other to move.

So when you have this vast space of possible combinations of building blocks and you have an open system where there's a source of energy in the environment that's going to be dumping energy into the system differently depending on the system's shape that's going to allow for a biased evolutionary exploration of the space of possible shapes where you start in some random shape some inanimate shape but then how your shape affects how you absorb energy and how you absorb energy affects how you change your shape and when you close that loop it actually has some of the same character of what we think of as the darwinian process, in fact, it's a physical generalization of the same character of the darwinian process which is a special case of this picture so you can still end up with a specially fine-tuned relationship between the pattern of the environmental energy source and the shapes of structures that form once.

Paul Davies: Life is anything but chaotic uh it's constrained energy flow and the when you look at these more subtle and complex processes at the molecular level you see that in this great space of possibilities which seems almost infinite it's actually narrowed a great deal just by the physics now for me this is an important part of the story. A new kind of physical law he said we must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing in it and i believe that there is a new kind of fiscal law i don't think we've got all the details worked out and i just give some ideas in in the book as to the type of physical law that that might be and i'm open to the fact it might involve quantum mechanics and other things or so.

My comment: There is only one source that can organize matter in a way that energy-generating turbines are created: Intelligence. Its neither darwinian mechanisms ( England), nor


Eugene V. Koonin: The Logic of Chance: page 252:
Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure—we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. 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.

Steve Benner:  Paradoxes in the origin of life
Discussed here is an alternative approach to guide research into the origins of life, one that focuses on “paradoxes”, pairs of statements, both grounded in theory and observation, that (taken
together) suggest that the “origins problem” cannot be solved.

Graham Cairns-Smith: Genetic takeover, page 66:
Now you may say that there are alternative ways of building up nucleotides, and perhaps there was some geochemical way on the early Earth. But what we know of the experimental difficulties in nucleotide synthesis speaks strongly against any such supposition. However it is to be put together, a nucleotide is too complex and metastable a molecule for there to be any reason to expect an easy synthesis.

Garrett: Biochemistry, 6th ed,  page 665
Key compounds, such as arginine, lysine, and histidine; the straight-chain fatty acids; porphyrins; and essential coenzymes, have not been convincingly synthesized under simulated prebiotic conditions.

Robert Shapiro: A Replicator Was Not Involved in the Origin of Life
A profound difficulty exists, however, with the idea of RNA, or any other replicator, at the start of life. Existing replicators can serve as templates for the synthesis of additional copies of themselves, but this device cannot be used for the preparation of the very first such molecule, which must arise spontaneously from an unorganized mixture. The formation of an information-bearing homopolymer through undirected chemical synthesis appears very improbable.

Kenji Ikehara Evolutionary Steps in the Emergence of Life Deduced from the Bottom-Up Approach and GADV Hypothesis (Top-Down Approach) 2016 Mar; 6
(1) nucleotides have not been produced from simple inorganic compounds through prebiotic means and have not been detected in any meteorites, although a small quantity of nucleobases can be obtained.
(2) It is quite difficult or most likely impossible to synthesize nucleotides and RNA through prebiotic means.
(3) It must also be impossible to self-replicate RNA with catalytic activity on the same RNA molecule.
(4) It would be impossible to explain the formation process of genetic information according to the RNA world hypothesis, because the information is comprised of triplet codon sequence, which would never be stochastically produced by joining of mononucleotides one by one.
(5) The formation process of the first genetic code cannot be explained by the hypothesis either, because a genetic code composed of around 60 codons must be prepared to synthesize proteins from the beginning.
(6) It is also impossible to transfer catalytic activity from a folded RNA ribozyme to a protein with a tertiary structure.

Peter Tompa: The Levinthal paradox of the interactome 2011
The inability of the interactome to self-assemble de novo imposes limits on efforts to create artificial cells and organisms, that is, synthetic biology. In particular, the stunning experiment of “creating” a viable bacterial cell by transplanting a synthetic chromosome into a host stripped of its own genetic material36 has been heralded as the generation of a synthetic cell43 (although not by the paper's authors). Such an interpretation is a misnomer, rather like stuffing a foreign engine into a Ford and declaring it to be a novel design.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3302650/

Claim: Tom Jump: RNA polymerization on clay has explained the problem of RNA polymerization. Applying inductive reasoning, we can generalize, and so say that naturalism explains the origin of life better than creationism, which provides no explanation.

Tom Jump Otangelo Grasso Should we be atheists or theists Mar 19, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRYfpCmP9tw

Reply: Using inductive reasoning fails in the attempt to explain the origin of life, because several different fields are involved, and various different problems require an explanation. 

Prof. Dr. Ruth E. Blake (2020): Special Issue "Phosphorus in the Origin of Life"
Investigating the origin of life requires an integrated and multidisciplinary approach including but not limited to biochemistry, microbiology, biophysics, geology, astrobiology, mathematical modeling, and astronomy. 13

What's quite challenging is that life is such a collection of different things that work in an integrated fashion so well together not just different components but life is based on chemistry and information. The origin of both are entirely different issues.  Different separate behaviors and different accomplishments, like self-replication, information transfer, or whether it's forming compartmentalization or modularity contribute to the overall accomplishment of the cell. One could break and divide the cell systems into different separate functional parts and various different things. Attempting to explain the origin of the enclosed cell membrane, is entirely different than explaining the origin of carbon and nitrogen fixation, upon which the origin of the basic building blocks like amino acids, RNA, and DNA depends - which - again, is also a different issue. We can move on to the quest for the origin of polymerization of RNA, DNA, or amino acids and the origin of instructional assembly information, and the genetic code. And the origin of energy production, etc.  So there is a very big standing leap: When one has eventually tackled one problem, many others remain.

Eliminative inductions prove that natural origins of cells merely by chemical reactions are false, and the only alternative, design is true. And abductive reasoning to the best explanation lead unambiguously to intelligent design as the best explanation. To the origin of life by the input of information, energy, and directed energy by an intelligent designer.

Some of the worlds leading scientists in the field of synthetic chemistry, biochemistry, and computational biology, like James Tour, Graham Cairns-Smith, Eugene Koonin and Steve Benner have stated that solving the mystery of the origin of life is categorically not possible, that science has no clue how to solve the riddle, that abiogenesis research is a failure, and the most difficult problem that faces evolutionary biology and, arguably, biology in general.

Edward J.Steele Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? August 2018
The idea of abiogenesis should have long ago been rejected.
…the dominant biological paradigm — abiogenesis in a primordial soup. The latter idea was developed at a time when the earliest living cells were considered to be exceedingly simple structures that could subsequently evolve in a Darwinian way. These ideas should of course have been critically examined and rejected after the discovery of the exceedingly complex molecular structures involved in proteins and in DNA. But this did not happen. Modern ideas of abiogenesis in hydrothermal vents or elsewhere on the primitive Earth have developed into sophisticated conjectures with little or no evidential support.  …independent abiogenesis on the cosmologically diminutive scale of oceans, lakes or hydrothermal vents remains a hypothesis with no empirical support…The conditions that would most likely to have prevailed near the impact-riddled Earth’s surface 4.1–4.23 billion years ago were too hot even for simple organic molecules to survive let alone evolve into living complexity. The requirement now, on the basis of orthodox abiogenic thinking, is that an essentially instantaneous transformation of non-living organic matter to bacterial life occurs, an assumption we consider strains credibility of Earth-bound abiogenesis beyond the limit. The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions, an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle. All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798

Eugene Koonin: advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics writes in his book: The Logic of Chance: 
" The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:

Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure—we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. 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 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. " 

James Tour: Dr. Tour on the Origin of Life at Syracuse University Cru  min. 23:53
Origin of life research is a retarded field of science little as advanced in the field since the highly touted 1952 Miller year experiment after 2/3 of a century the world is no closer to generating life
from small molecules or any molecules for that matter than it was in 1952 one could argue that origin of life research is, even more, befuddle now than it was in 1952 since more questions have evolved in answers since we understand much more about the cell it's made us realize that we're further from having a cell.

At least Miller Urey took some simple compounds passed them across a large voltage gap and saw some scrambled amino acids at least that was simple stuff going on in there now there are really elaborate experiments and still they get very little this explains the retarded state of origin of life research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gsa58Rm8Sk&feature=youtu.be

It appears that nature itself provides conclusive evidence that natural processes are incapable of assembling a living cell. Wherever one looks there are problems. 8

Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began
The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far-out—literally—speculation. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life's beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse (see for example the screed "Darwinism Refuted," which cites my 1991 article), but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/

Steve Benner:  Paradoxes in the origin of life. 2015 Jan 22 Benner SA1.
S.Benner is the founder and president of the Westheimer Corporation, a private research organization, and a prior Harvard University professor. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on abiogenesis. This is his evaluation of what he has observed:  Discussed here is an alternative approach to guide research into the origins of life, one that focuses on “paradoxes”, pairs of statements, both grounded in theory and observation, that (taken
together) suggest that the “origins problem” cannot be solved.

We are now 60 years into the modern era of prebiotic chemistry. That era has produced tens of thousands of papers attempting to define processes by which “molecules that look like biology” might arise from “molecules that do not look like biology” …. For the most part, these papers report “success” in the sense that those papers define the term…. And yet, the problem remains unsolved
https://sci-hub.ee/10.1007/s11084-014-9379-0

"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."

Graham Cairns-Smith: Chemistry and the Missing Era of Evolution
The “RNA world” idea requires a geochemically implausible supply of RNA monomers.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18260066

Cairns-Smith:  Genetic takeover,page 66:
The implausibility of prevital nucleic acid

Now you may say that there are alternative ways of building up nucleotides, and perhaps there was some geochemical way on the early Earth. But what we know of the experimental difficulties in nucleotide synthesis speaks strongly against any such supposition. However it is to be put together, a nucleotide is too complex and metastable a molecule for there to be any reason to expect an easy synthesis.

If you were to consider in more detail a process such as the purification of an intermediate ( to form amide bonds between amino acids and nucleotides ) you would find many subsidiary operations — washings, pH changes and so on. (Remember Merrifield’s machine: for one overall reaction, making one peptide bond, there were about 90 distinct operations required.)

A. G. CAIRNS-SMITH  Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story 1990 page 14
The optimism ( about the origin of life) persists in many elementary textbooks. There is even, sometimes, a certain boredom with the question; as if it was now merely difficult because of an obscurity of view, a difficulty of knowing now the details of distant historical events. What a pity if the problem had really become like that! Fortunately it hasn't. It remains a singular case (Sherlock Holmes' favourite kind): far from there being a million ways in detail in which evolution could have got under way, there seems now to have been no obvious way at all. The singular feature is in the gap between the simplest conceivable version of organisms as we know them, and components that the Earth might reasonably have been able to generate. This gap can be seen more clearly now. It is enormous.

Evolution through natural selection depends on there being a modifiable hereditary memory - forms of that special kind that survive through making copies of copies...,Successions of machines that can remember like this, i.e. organisms, seem to be necessarily very complicated. Even man the engineer has never contrived such things. How could Nature have done so before its only engineer, natural selection, had had the means to operate? If life really did arise on the Earth ' through natural causes' then it must be that either there does not, after all, have to be a long-term hereditary memory for evolution, or organisms do not, after all, have to be particularly complex.

My comment: Since a minimal free living self replicating cell is particularly complex, and evolution was not an available mechanism to explain its origin, divine intelligent design is the superior explanation. 

Suddenly in our thinking we are faced with the seemingly unequivocal need for a fully working machine of incredible complexity: a machine that has to be complex, it seems, not just to work well but to work at all. Is there
cause to complain about this official tourist route to the mountain? Is it just a garden path that we have been led along - easy walking, but never getting anywhere? I think it is. And I think we have been misled by what seem to be the two main clues: the unity of biochemistry and what is said to be the ease with which 'the molecules of life' can be made.

Iris Fry: The role of natural selection in the origin of life 2010 Apr 21
"I conclude that despite the recent theoretical advances in all these lines of research, and despite experimental breakthroughs, especially in overcoming several RNA-first hurdles, none of the examined paradigms has yet attained decisive experimental support. Demonstrating the evolvability of a potentially prebiotic infrastructure, whether genetic or metabolic, is a most serious challenge. So is the experimental demonstration of the emergence of such infrastructure under prebiotic conditions. The current agenda before origin-of-life researchers of all stripes and colors is the search for the experimental means to tackle all these difficulties."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20407927

Re-conceptualizing the origins of life  2017 Dec 28
The origin of life is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in science. It is also notorious for being one of the most difficult. It is now almost 100 years since scientific efforts to solve the problem began in earnest, with the work of Oparin and Haldane.  ‘Bottom-up’ approaches have not yet generated anything nearly as complex as a living cell. At most, we are lucky to generate short polypeptides or polynucleotides or simple vesicles—a far cry from the complexity of anything living.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5686397/?fbclid=IwAR0jkHj-5MnRw5MMgm6xijPFMWlPbbQ5XOlkC9ZmFsE645yl-5zjrQgs4HQ

Life's Probability Problem May 25, 2017
Although researchers have made great progress on revealing how complex molecules and complex chemical networks can emerge from simpler starter ingredients, the whole story is still a mystery.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/lifes-probability-problem/

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Abiogenesis - By unguided chemical reactions? - No chance !!
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 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 the 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 the 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 !!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1306800/

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3 June 2014 Jack Szostak: "Life in Lab" In 3 - 5 Years
Harvard biologist and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak told a "Search for Life" gathering of 50 on Saturday afternoon in New York that he expected to make "life in the lab" in three to five years. And more likely within three years.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1406/S00007/jack-szostak-life-in-lab-in-3-5-years.htm

10 December 2020 | Nature | Vol 588 |
THE WATER PARADOX AND THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
But many scientists today say there’s a fundamental problem with that idea: life’s cornerstone molecules break down in water. This is
because proteins, and nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA, are vulnerable at their joints. Proteins are made of chains of amino acids, and nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides. If the chains are placed in water, it attacks the links and eventually breaks them. In carbon chemistry, “water is an enemy to be excluded as rigorously as possible”, wrote the late biochemist Robert Shapiro in his totemic 1986 book Origins, which critiqued the primordial ocean hypothesis
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-03461-4/d41586-020-03461-4.pdf

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Sem_tz22

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Syllogisms:
1. Life requires the use of a limited set of complex biomolecules, a universal convention, and unity which is composed of the four basic building blocks of life ( RNA and DNA's, amino acids, phospholipids, and carbohydrates). They are of a very specific complex functional composition and made by cells in extremely sophisticated orchestrated metabolic pathways, which were not extant on the early earth. If abiogenesis were true, these biomolecules had to be prebiotically available and naturally occurring ( in non-enzyme-catalyzed ways by natural means ) and then somehow join in an organized way and form the first living cells. They had to be available in big quantities, somehow purified, and concentrated at one specific building site. 
2. Making things for a specific purpose, for a distant goal, requires goal-directedness. And that's a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Competition and selection among them would never have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless. Selection is a scope and powerless mechanism to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of the living order.
3. We know that a) unguided random purposeless events are unlikely to the extreme to make specific purposeful elementary components to build large integrated macromolecular systems, and b) intelligence has goal-directedness. Bricks do not form from clay by themselves, and then line up to make walls. Someone made them. Phospholipids do not form from glycerol, a phosphate group, and two fatty acid chains by themselves, and line up to make cell membranes. Someone made them. That is God.

1. On the one side, we have the putative prebiotic soup with the random chaotic floating around of the basic building blocks of life, and on the other side,  the first living self-replicating cell ( LUCA ), a supposed fully operational minimal self-replicating cell, using the highly specific and sophisticated molecular milieu with a large team of enzymes which catalyze the reactions to produce the four basic building blocks of life in a cooperative manner, and furthermore, able to maintain intracellular homeostasis, reproduce, obtaining energy and converting it into a usable form, getting rid of toxic waste, protecting itself from dangers of the environment, doing the cellular repair, and communicate.  
2. The science paper: Structural analyses of a hypothetical minimal metabolism proposes a minimal number of 50 enzymatic steps catalyzed by the associated encoded proteins. They don't, however, include the steps to synthesize the 20 amino acids required in life. Including those, the minimal metabolome would consist of 221 enzymes & proteins. A large number of molecular machines, co-factors, scaffold proteins, and chaperones are not included, required to build this highly sophisticated chemical factory.
3. There simply no feasible viable prebiotic route to go from a random prebiotic soup to this minimal proteome to kick-start metabolism by unguided means. This is not a conclusion by ignorance & incredulity, but it is reasonable to be skeptic, that this irreducibly complex biological system, entire factory complexes composed of myriads of interconnected highly optimized production lines, full of computers and robots could emerge naturally defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of random unguided events and physical necessity. Comparing the two competing hypotheses, chance vs intelligent design, the second is simply by far the more case-adequate & reasonable explanation.  

1.  In Miller’s experiment he was careful to make sure there was no oxygen present. If oxygen was present, then the amino acids would not form. However, if oxygen was absent from the earth, then there would be no ozone layer, and if there was no ozone layer the ultraviolet radiation would penetrate the atmosphere and would destroy the amino acids as soon as they were formed. So the dilemma can be summed up this way: amino acids would not form in an atmosphere with oxygen and amino acids would be destroyed in an atmosphere without oxygen.
2. The next problem concerns the so-called handedness of the amino acids. Because of the way that carbon atoms join up with other atoms, amino acids exist in two forms—the right-handed form and the left-handed form. Just as your right hand and left hand are identical in all respects except for their handedness, so the two forms of amino acids are identical except for their handedness. In all living systems only left-handed amino acids are found. Yet Miller’s experiment produced a mixture of right-handed and left-handed amino acids in identical proportions. As only the left-handed ones are used in living systems, this mixture is useless for the evolution of living systems.
3. Another major problem for the chemical evolutionist is the origin of the information that is found in living systems. There are various claims about the amount of information that is found in the human genome, but it can be conservatively estimated as being equivalent to a few thousand books, each several hundred pages long. Where did this information come from?
4. If the many instructions that direct an animal’s or plant’s immune system had not been preprogrammed in the organism’s genetic system when it first appeared on earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have killed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense.a Obviously, for each organism to have survived, all this information must have been there from the beginning.  
5.The sugar found in the backbone of both DNA and RNA, ribose, has been particularly problematic, as the most prebiotically plausible chemical reaction schemes have typically yielded only a small amount of ribose mixed with a diverse assortment of other sugar molecules.
6. all the peptide links to form a proptein must be alpha-peptide bonds, not some mix of alpha and epsilon,beta, and gamma bonds
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html
"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."
7.amino acids and sugars combine and destroy each other. In lab experiments the component chemicals are neatly separated from one another. How is this possible in a primitive ocean?
8. Synthesis vs destruction - For chemical bonds to form there needs to be an external source of energy. Unfortunately, the same energy that creates the bonds is much more likely to destroy them. In the famous Miller experiment (1953) that synthesized amino acids, a cold trap is used to selectively isolate the reaction products. Without this, the would be no products. This poses a challenge to simplistic early earth schemes where lightning simply strikes a primitive ocean. Where is the "trap" in such an ocean? Also, the creation of amino acids by a chemist in a laboratory is still much different from forming self-replicating life.


Videos:
Abiogenesis? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJblRcgqXk

Chemical evolution of amino acids and proteins? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L1MfGrtk0A&t=1143s

RNA & DNA: It's prebiotic synthesis: Impossible !! Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZFlmL_BsXE

RNA & DNA: It's prebiotic synthesis: Impossible !! Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv4mUjmuRRU

Paul Davies & Jeremy England • The Origins of Life: Do we need a new theory for how life began?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IU2ZWrkhg

Eric Smith on the Origin of Life
The Origins and Evolution of the Ribosome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei6qGLBTsKM

Ribosome Origins and Evolution - Prof. George Fox, University of Houston
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ROJOBDCCLE

Central Dogma & Origin of the Ribosome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2DaEyfN0Ws

Difference between 70S and 80S Ribosomes (Prokaryotic vs Eukaryotic ribosomes) Subtitled
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfThTO-mj0

BIOGENESIS: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere by Eric Smith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgSal2Cv9qw

Inevitable Life ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw


Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible

The Cell is  a Factory
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2245-the-cell-is-a-factory

DNA stores literally coded information
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1281-dna-stores-literally-coded-information

The possible mechanisms to explain the origin of life
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2515-the-possible-mechanisms-to-explain-the-origin-of-life

Calculations of life beginning through unguided, natural, random events
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2508-calculations-of-life-beginning-through-unguided-natural-random-events

The cell is irreducibly complex
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex

The irreducible, code-instructed process to make cell factories and machines points to intelligent design
https://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
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1312-coded-information-comes-always-from-a-mind

All cellular functions are  irreducibly complex
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2179-the-cell-is-a-interdependent-irreducible-complex-system

The Cell membrane, irreducible complexity
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2128-membrane-structure#3798

The Interdependency of Lipid Membranes and Membrane Proteins
https://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
https://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
https://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?  
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2110-what-might-be-a-protocells-minimal-requirement-of-parts

How Cellular Enzymatic and Metabolic networks  point to design
https://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
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2445-new-amazing-molecular-assembly-lines-and-non-ribosomal-amino-acid-chain-formation-pathways-come-to-light

More readings:
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

Stephen C. Meyer: DNA AND OTHER DESIGNS April 2000
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/04/dna-and-other-designs

Thomas F. Heinze: Scientific Evidence that God Created Life
https://creationism.org/heinze/SciEvidGodLife.htm

Chuck Missler:  The Origin of Life and The Suppression of Truth
http://xwalk.ca/origin.html

The Odds
http://xwalk.ca/origin.html#fn20

Abiogenesis Is Impossible
https://www.debate.org/debates/Abiogenesis-Is-Impossible/1/

The Miller-Urey experiment
http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/content/article/51.html

15 loopholes in the evolutionary theory of the origin of life: Summary
http://creation.com/loopholes-in-the-evolutionary-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-summary

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

https://answersingenesis.org/origin-of-life/the-origin-of-life-dna-and-protein/

Abiogenic Origin of Life: A Theory in Crisis 
https://origins.swau.edu/papers/life/chadwick/default.pdf

Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life
http://www.creationism.org.pl/groups/ptkrmember/inne/2004/Trevors,%20Abel,%20Chance%20and%20necessity%20do%20not%20explain%20the%20origin%20of%20life.pdf

The Origin of Life: What We Do and Don’t Know 
http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/lifeandthecosmos/wkshop/sep2012/present/CleavesSILifeInTheCosmosTalk2012b.pdf

Plausible prebiotic synthesis
https://www.science.gov/topicpages/p/plausible+prebiotic+synthesis.html

Moshe Averick:It’s Easy to Be an Atheist if You Ignore Science  AUGUST 10, 2016
https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/08/10/its-easy-to-be-an-atheist-if-you-ignore-science/

Ashby L. Camp:  COMPILATION OF QUOTES ON THE COMPLEXITY OF A CELL AND THE SCIENTIFIC MYSTERY OF LIFE'S ORIGIN
http://theoutlet.us/Quotesoncomplexityofcellandoriginoflife.pdf

Origin of life quotes 

Atheist myths debunked - Abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of life from sterile matter.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/16208667768/in/photolist-qGiEe7-ntpng3-p47acs-v2h544-pVpvA2-qLrk28-pVCjgF-ptctWq-pQYvD8-GC7wCj-r9SUPL-prfnyL-pw4eKS-kJEHCU-pkvDrJ-obZFsS-nVM5f7-kwT4qB-mBQN2N-q4AvLr-kmqhat-kmpZ5r-kjQn6r-kmstMU-kJVYxn



Last edited by Otangelo on Sat Sep 23, 2023 5:10 am; edited 255 times in total

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Open questions in prebiotic chemistry to explain the origin of the four basic building blocks of life

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#1773

1. Life requires the use of a limited set of complex biomolecules, a universal convention, and unity which is composed of the four basic building blocks of life ( RNA and DNA's, amino acids, phospholipids, and carbohydrates). They are of a very specific complex functional composition and made by cells in extremely sophisticated orchestrated metabolic pathways, which were not extant on the early earth. If abiogenesis were true, these biomolecules had to be prebiotically available and naturally occurring ( in non-enzyme-catalyzed ways by natural means ) and then somehow join in an organized way and form the first living cells. They had to be available in big quantities and concentrated at one specific building site. 
2. Making things for a specific purpose, for a distant goal, requires goal-directedness. And that's a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Competition and selection among them would never have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless. Selection is a scope and powerless mechanism to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of the living order.
3. We know that a) unguided random purposeless events are unlikely to the extreme to make specific purposeful elementary components to build large integrated macromolecular systems, and b) intelligence has goal-directedness. Bricks do not form from clay by themselves, and then line up to make walls. Someone made them. Phospholipids do not form from glycerol, a phosphate group, and two fatty acid chains by themselves, and line up to make cell membranes. Someone made them. That is God.

RNA & DNA: It's prebiotic synthesis: Impossible !! Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZFlmL_BsXE

RNA & DNA: It's prebiotic synthesis: Impossible !! Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv4mUjmuRRU

How would the primitive Earth have generated and maintained organic molecules? All that can be said is that there might have been prevital organic chemistry going on, at least in special locations. 
How would prebiotic processes have purified the starting molecules to make RNA and DNA which were grossly impure? They would have been present in complex mixtures that contained a great variety of reactive molecules.
How did the synthesis of the nitrogenic nucleobases in prebiotic environments occur?
How did fortuitous accidents select the five just-right nucleobases to make DNA and RNA, Two purines, and three pyrimidines?
How did unguided random events select purines with two rings, with nine atoms, forming the two rings: 5 carbon atoms and 4 nitrogen atoms, amongst almost unlimited possible configurations?
How did stochastic coincidence select pyrimidines with one ring, with six atoms, forming its ring: 4 carbon atoms and 2 nitrogen atoms, amongst an unfathomable number of possible configurations?
How did random trial and error foresee that this specific atomic arrangement of the nucleobases is required to get the right strength of the hydrogen bond to join the two DNA strands and form Watson–Crick base-pairing?
How did mechanisms without external direction foresee that this specific atomic arrangement would convey one of, if not the best possible genetic system to store information?
How would these functional bases have been separated from the confusing jumble of similar molecules that would also have been made?
How were high-energy precursors to produce purines and pyrimidines produced in a sufficiently concentrated form and joined to the assembly site?
How could the adenine-uracil interaction function in any specific recognition scheme under the chaotic conditions of a "prebiotic soup" considering that its interaction is weak and nonspecific?
How could sufficient uracil nucleobases accumulate in prebiotic environments in sufficient quantities, if it has a half-life of only 12 years at 100◦C ?
How could the ribose 5 carbon sugar rings which form the RNA and DNA backbone have been selected, if 6 or 4 carbon rings, or even more or less, are equally possible but non-functional?
How would the functional ribose molecules have been separated from the non-functional sugars?
How were the correct nitrogen atom of the base and the correct carbon atom of the sugar selected to be joined together?
How could right-handed configurations of RNA and DNA have been selected in a racemic pool of right and left-handed molecules? Ribose must have been in its D form to adopt functional structures ( The homochirality problem )
How could random events have brought all the 3 parts together and bonded them in the right position ( probably over one million nucleotides would have been required ?)
How could prebiotic reactions have produced functional nucleosides? (There are no known ways of bringing about this thermodynamically uphill reaction in aqueous solution)
How could prebiotic glycosidic bond formation between nucleosides and the base have occurred if they are thermodynamically unstable in water, and overall intrinsically unstable?
How could  RNA nucleotides have accumulated, if they degrade at warm temperatures in time periods ranging from nineteen days to twelve years? These are extremely short survival rates for the four RNA nucleotide building blocks.
How was phosphate, the third element, concentrated at reasonable concentrations?. (The concentrations in the oceans or lakes would have been very low)
How would prebiotic mechanisms phosphorylate the nucleosides at the correct site (the 5' position) if, in laboratory experiments, the 2' and 3' positions were also phosphorylated?
How could phosphate have been activated somehow? In order to promote the energy dispendious nucleotide polymerization reaction, and (energetically uphill) phosphorylation of the nucleoside had to be possible.
How was the energy supply accomplished to make RNA? In modern cells, energy is consumed to make RNA.
How could a transition from prebiotic to biochemical synthesis have occurred? There are a huge gap and enormous transition that would be still ahead to arrive at a fully functional interlocked and interdependent metabolic network.
How could  RNA have formed, if it requires water to make them, but RNA cannot emerge in water and cannot replicate with sufficient fidelity in water without sophisticated repair mechanisms in place?
How would the prebiotic synthesis transition of RNA to the highly regulated cellular metabolic synthesis have occurred?  The pyrimidine synthesis pathway requires six regulated steps, seven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP.
The starting material for purine biosynthesis is Ribose 5-phosphate, a product of the highly complex pentose phosphate pathway, which uses 12 enzymes. De novo purine synthesis pathway requires ten regulated steps, eleven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP.
How would the primitive earth have produced high-energy precursors of purines and pyrimidines  in a sufficiently concentrated form? (for example at least 0.01 M HCN). 
How would the bases have been separated from the confusing jumble of similar molecules that would also have been made? - and the solutions had to be sufficiently concentrated. 
How did formaldehyde concentration of above 0.01 M build up? 
How did accumulated formaldehyde oligomerise to sugars? 
How did the sugars separate and resolve, so as to give a moderately good concentration of, for example, D-ribose? 
How did bases and sugars  come together? 
How were they induced to react to make nucleosides? (There are no known ways of bringing about this thermo dynamically uphill reaction in aqueous solution: purine nucleosides have been made by dry phase synthesis, but not even this method has been successful for condensing pyrimidine bases and ribose to give nucleosides
How was joining base and sugar achieved correctly ? It had to be between the correct nitrogen atom of the base and the correct carbon atom of the sugar. This junction will fix the pentose sugar as either the a- or fl-anomer of either the furanose or pyranose forms. For nucleic acids it has to be the fl-furanose. (In the dry-phase purine nucleoside syntheses referred to above, all four of these isomers were present with never more than 8 ‘Z, of the correct structure.) 
How could phosphate have been present at sufficient concentrations? (The concentrations in the oceans would have been very low, so we must think about special situations—evaporating lagoons and such things  
How could phosphate have been activated? — for example as a linear or cyclic polyphosphate — so that (energetically uphill) phosphorylation of the nucleoside is possible? 
How would only the standard nucleotides, the 5’- hydroxyl of the ribose be phosphorylated? (In solid-state reactions with urea and inorganic phosphates as a phosphorylating agent, this was the dominant species to begin with. 
How did the activated nucleotides (or the nucleotides with coupling agent) polymerise?. Initially this must have happened without a pre-existing polynucleotide template (this has proved very difficult to simulate ; but more important, it must have come to take place on pre-existing polynucleotides if the key function of transmitting information to daughter molecules was to be achieved by abiotic means. This has proved difficult too. Orgel & Lohrmann give three main classes of problem. 
(i) While it has been shown that adenosine derivatives form stable helical structures with poly(U) — they are in fact triple helixes — and while this enhances the condensation of adenylic acid with either adenosine or another adenylic acid — mainly to di(A) - stable helical structures were not formed when either poly(A) or poly(G) Were used as templates. 
(ii) It was difficult to find a suitable means of making the internucleotide bonds. Specially designed water-soluble carbodiimides were used in the experiments described above, but the obvious pre-activated nucleotides — ATP or cyclic 2’,3’-phosphates — were unsatisfactory. Nucleoside 5'-phosphorimidazolides, for example: N/\ n K/N/P-r’o%OHN/\N were more successful, but these now involve further steps and a supply of imidazole, for their synthesis. 
(iii) Internucleotide bonds formed on a template are usually a mixture of 2’—5’ and the normal 3’—5’ types. Often the 2’—5’ bonds predominate although it has been found that Zn“, as well as acting as an eflicient catalyst for the templatedirected oligomerisation of guanosine 5’-phosphorimidazolide also leads to a preference for the 3’—5’ bonds. 
How could the physical and chemical environment have been at all times suitable — for example the pH, the temperature, the M2+ concentrations? 
How could all reactions have taken place well out of the ultraviolet sunlight? that is, not only away from its direct, highly destructive effects on nucleic acid-like molecules, but away too from the radicals produced by the sunlight, and from the various longer lived reactive species produced by these radicals. 
If not already activated — for example as the cyclic 2’,3’-phosphate — how were the nucleotides be activated? (for example with polyphosphate) and a reasonably pure solution of these species created of reasonable concentration. Alternatively, a suitable coupling agent must now have been fed into the system.
Longer heating gave the nucleoside cyclic 2’,3’-phosphate as the major product although various dinucleotide derivatives and nucleoside polyphosphates are also formed 

DNA is more stable than RNA. uracil (U) is replaced in DNA by thymine (T)
At the C2' position of ribose, an oxygen atom is removed by hypercomplex RNR molecular machines. The thymine-uracil exchange is the major chemical difference between DNA and RNA. Before being incorporated into the chromosomes, this essential modification takes place. The synthesis of thymine requires seven enzymes. De novo biosynthesis of thymine is an intricate and energetically expensive process.
All in all, not considering the metabolic pathways and enzymes required to make the precursors to start RNA and DNA synthesis, at least 26  enzymes are required. How did these enzymes emerge, if DNA is required to make them? 

Open questions in prebiotic amino acid synthesis

Chemical evolution of amino acids and proteins ? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L1MfGrtk0A

How could ammonia (NH3), the precursor for amino acid synthesis, have accumulated on prebiotic earth, if the lifetime of ammonia would be short because of its photochemical dissociation?
How could prebiotic events have delivered organosulfur compounds required for a few amino acids used in life, if in nature sulfur exists only in its most oxidized form (sulfate or SO4), and only some unique groups of procaryotes mediate the reduction of SO4 to its most reduced state (sulfide or H2S)?
How did unguided stochastic coincidence select the right amongst over 500 that occur naturally on earth?
How was the concomitant synthesis of undesired or irrelevant by-products avoided?
How were bifunctional monomers, that is, molecules with two functional groups, so they combine with two others selected, and unifunctional monomers (with only one functional group) sorted out?
How did prebiotic events produce the twenty amino acids used in life? Eight proteinogenic amino acids were never abiotically synthesized under prebiotic conditions.
How did a prebiotic synthesis of biological amino acids avoid the concomitant synthesis of undesired or irrelevant by-products?
How could achiral precursors of amino acids have produced and concentrated only left-handed amino acids? ( The homochirality problem )
How did the transition from prebiotic enantiomer selection to the enzymatic reaction of transamination occur that had to be extant when cellular self-replication and life began?
How would natural causes have selected twenty, and not more or less amino acids to make proteins?
How did natural events have foreknowledge that the selected amino acids are best suited to enable the formation of soluble structures with close-packed cores, allowing the presence of ordered binding pockets inside proteins?
How did nature "kHow could ammonia (NH3), the precursor for amino acid synthesis, have accumulated on prebiotic earth, if the lifetime of ammonia would be short because of its photochemical dissociation?
How could prebiotic events have delivered organosulfur compounds required in a few amino acids used in life, if in nature sulfur exists only in its most oxidized form (sulfate or SO4), and only some unique groups of procaryotes mediate the reduction of SO4 to its most reduced state (sulfide or H2S)?
How was the concomitant synthesis of undesired or irrelevant by-products avoided?
How were bifunctional monomers, that is, molecules with two functional groups so they combine with two others selected, and unifunctional monomers (with only one functional group) sorted out?
How did prebiotic events produce the twenty amino acids used in life? Eight proteinogenic amino acids were never abiotically synthesized under prebiotic conditions.
How did a prebiotic synthesis of biological amino acids avoid the concomitant synthesis of undesired or irrelevant by-products?
How could achiral precursors of amino acids have produced and concentrated only left-handed amino acids? (The homochirality problem)
How did the transition from prebiotic enantiomer selection to the enzymatic reaction of transamination occur that had to be extant when cellular self-replication and life began?
How would natural causes have selected twenty, and not more or less amino acids to make proteins?
How did natural events have foreknowledge that the selected amino acids are best suited to enable the formation of soluble structures with close-packed cores, allowing the presence of ordered binding pockets inside proteins?
How did nature "know" that the set of amino acids selected appears to be near ideal and optimal?
How did Amino acid synthesis regulation emerge?  Biosynthetic pathways are often highly regulated such that building blocks are synthesized only when supplies are low.
How did the transition from prebiotic synthesis to cell synthesis of amino acids occur? A minimum of 112 enzymes is required to synthesize the 20 (+2) amino acids used in proteins.now" that the set of amino acids selected appears to be near ideal and optimal?
How did Amino acid synthesis regulation emerge?  Biosynthetic pathways are often highly regulated such that building blocks are synthesized only when supplies are low.
How did the transition from prebiotic synthesis to cell synthesis of amino acids occur? A minimum of 112 enzymes is required to synthesize the 20 (+2) amino acids used in proteins.

Open questions in prebiotic cell membrane synthesis
How could simple amphiphiles, which are molecules containing a nonpolar hydrophobic region and a polar hydrophilic region will self-assemble in aqueous solutions to form distinct structures such as micelles have been available in the prebiotic inventory if there has never been evidence for this? Furthermore, sources of compounds with hydrocarbon chains sufficiently long to form stable membranes are not known.
How could prebiotic mechanisms have transported and concentrated organic compounds to the pools and construction site?
How could membranous vesicles have self-assembled to form complex mixtures of organic compounds and ionic solutes, if science has no solution to this question?
How could there have been a prebiotic route of lipid compositions that could provide a membrane barrier sufficient to maintain proton gradients? Proton gradients are absolutely necessary for the generation of energy.
How to explain that lipid membranes would be useless without membrane proteins but how could membrane proteins have emerged or evolved in the absence of functional membranes?
How did prebiotic processes select hydrocarbon chains which must be in the range of 14 to 18 carbons in length?  There was no physical necessity to form carbon chains of the right length nor hindrance to join chains of varying lengths. So they could have been existing of any size on the early earth.
How could there have been an "urge" for prebiotic compounds to add unsaturated cis double bonds near the center of the chain?
How is there a feasible route of prebiotic phospholipid synthesis, to the complex metabolic phospholipid and fatty acid synthesis pathways performed by multiple enzyme-catalyzed steps which had to be fully operational at LUCA?
How would random events start to attach two fatty acids to glycerol by ester or ether bonds rather than just one, necessary for the cell membrane stability?
How would random events start to produce biological membranes which are not composed of pure phospholipids, but instead are mixtures of several phospholipid species, often with a sterol admixture such as cholesterol? There is no feasible prebiotic mechanism to join the right mixtures.
How did unguided events produce the essential characteristic of living cells which is homeostasis, the ability to maintain a steady and more-or-less constant chemical balance in a changing environment?  The first forms of life required an effective Ca2+ homeostatic system, which maintained intracellular Ca2+ at comfortably low concentrations—somewhere  ∼10,000–20,000 times lower than that in the extracellular milieu. There was no mechanism to generate this gradient.
How was the transition generated from supposedly simple vesicles on the early earth to the ultracomplex membrane synthesis in modern cells, which would have to be extant in the last universal common ancestor, hosting at least over 70 enzymes?

Physico-Chemical and Evolutionary Constraints for the Formation and Selection of First Biopolymers: Towards the Consensus Paradigm of the Abiogenic Origin of Life 21 September 2007 1
It was suggested that the accumulation and interaction of increasingly complex compounds, formed under primordial conditions, could eventually lead to the origin of life. This initial paradigm did not contain much detail on the particular chemical routes involved.  Absence of a consensus among the members of the scientific community is causing problems outside science by opening the window for the proponents of the intelligent design as another, supposedly equally plausible hypothesis of origin of life. Therefore, we see an urgent task to formulate a consensus scenario for the abiogenic origin of life that 1) would be scientifically plausible, 2) could serve as a common basis/paradigm for the scientists with different views, and 3) could eventually be offered to the general public. the replication first and metabolism first hypotheses complement, rather than contradict, each other. Further, we suggest that life on Earth has started from a metabolism-driven replication and attempt to reconstruct the conditions under which such a replication could have occurred.

An important chemical constraint, which often remains unrecognized, is the reversibility of most (bio)chemical reactions. Therefore, any scheme that explains biopolymer formation under certain environmental conditions should also be able to explain why the synthesis of the given biopolymers would not be followed by their immediate hydrolysis. One cannot help noting that, in virtually all papers describing origin of life, the corresponding schemes contain unidirectional arrows, instead of bidirectional ones. However, the mechanisms that underlie that unidirectionality are almost never described. In a way, the mechanisms for formation and maintenance of
biopolymers require some kind of Maxwell's Demon that would allow the reaction to go in the direction of increasingly complex compounds. Such a demon is hard to imagine, which serves as fertile ground for ideas of some kind of Supreme Being that was needed to breathe life into disorganized organic matter. The simplest substitution for this kind of Maxwell's Demon would be a Darwin's Demon, a selective mechanism that favors complex molecules (structures) over simple ones. Obviously, it would require external source(s) of energy. However, such a selective mechanism acting for a sufficiently long period of time appears to be a necessary condition for sustaining abiogenic evolution that could have produced a variety of pre-biological molecules and eventually brought about the first living organisms.

My comment: It is remarkable how the authors see the hypothesis of intelligent design as a problem ( a problem to whom??). Also, if, as the authors propose that metabolism and replication had to emerge together, than this is a nice admittance of irreducible complexity, which i fully agree with.

Formation and maintaining of increasingly complex biopolymers could proceed only if supported by a constant flow of utilizable energy. This consideration severely constrains otherwise plausible hypotheses of origin of life
under impact bombardment that tend to treat emergence of life as a one-time event. The second law of thermodynamics imposes an additional, less obvious constraint on the origin of life, namely, that heat cannot be used
as an energy source for the formation of increasingly complex chemical compounds. Hence, the ultimate source of energy must be external and constant, which effectively leaves solar radiation as the most likely candidate.

Open questions in prebiotic sourcing of hydrocarbons
How would an ensemble of minerals present anywhere on the primitive Earth be capable of catalyzing each of the many steps of the reverse citric acid cycle? How would a cycle mysteriously organize itself topographically on a metal sulfide surface? How would such a cycle, despite the lack of evidence of its existence, a transition to the “life-like” complexity of the Wood-Ljundahl cycle, or reverse TCA cycle, commonly proposed as the first carbon fixing cycles on earth?

In this work, we emphasize the role of selection during the prebiological stages of evolution and focus on the constraints that are imposed by physical, chemical, and biological laws. The key feature of the scenario is the participation of the UV irradiation both as driving and selecting forces during the earlier stages of evolution.

Ultraviolet radiation was then already considered as an energy source but was not used, since it was difficult to generate radiation of appropriate wavelength with sources available at that time (Miller and Urey 1959). 2 The prebiotic UV environment was exposed to high levels of UV radiation relative to the present day due to lack of UV-shielding O2 and O3. 3. High environmental fluxes of UV–C and UV–B restricting protocyanobacteria to refuges. J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1962) independently proposed the existence of a prebiotic soup in the oceans (Haldane 1954) and suggested that subjecting a mixture of water, carbon dioxide and ammonia to UV light should produce a variety of organic substances. Dauvillier (1947) was one of the first in suggesting UV radiation as an energy source for the synthesis of organic matter. In the words of Sagan & Khare (1971), “the availability of the ultraviolet solar radiation was some 100 times greater that of all the others”. It is a paradox how the molecule responsible for the replication of information has such a large absorption in the damaging UV spectral range. Sagan (1973) suggested the existence of a protecting layer of purines and pyrimidines surrounding the primitive organisms.The decrease in UV surface fluxes was essential for the access of living beings to the land and the subsequent evolution of complex life forms. 4 

No prebiotic selection !!
1. Life requires the use of a limited set of complex biomolecules, a universal convention, and unity which is composed of the four basic building blocks of life ( RNA and DNA's, amino acids, phospholipids, and carbohydrates). They are of a very specific complex functional composition and made by cells in extremely sophisticated orchestrated metabolic pathways, which were not extant on the early earth. If abiogenesis were true, these biomolecules had to be prebiotically available and naturally occurring ( in non-enzyme-catalyzed ways by natural means ) and then somehow join in an organized way and form the first living cells. They had to be available in big quantities and concentrated at one specific building site. 
2. Making things for a specific purpose, for a distant goal, requires goal-directedness. And that's a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Competition and selection among them would never have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless. Selection is a scope and powerless mechanism to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of the living order.
3. We know that a) unguided random purposeless events are unlikely to the extreme to make specific purposeful elementary components to build large integrated macromolecular systems, and b) intelligence has goal-directedness. Bricks do not form from clay by themselves, and then line up to make walls. Someone made them. Phospholipids do not form from glycerol, a phosphate group, and two fatty acid chains by themselves, and line up to make cell membranes. Someone made them. That is God.

If a machine has to be made out of certain components, then the components have to be made first.'

Molecules have nothing to gain by becoming the building blocks of life. They are "happy" to lay on the ground or float in the prebiotic ocean and that's it. Being incredulous that they would concentrate at one building site in the right mixture, and in the right complex form, that would permit them to complexify in an orderly manner and assembly into complex highly efficient molecular machines and self-replicating cell factories, is not only justified but warranted and sound reasoning. That fact alone destroys materialism & naturalism. Being credulous towards such a scenario means to stick to blind belief. And claiming that "we don't know (yet), but science is working on it, but the expectation is that the explanation will be a naturalistic one ( No God required) is a materialism of the gaps argument.

A Few Experimental Suggestions Using Minerals to Obtain Peptides with a High Concentration of L-Amino Acids and Protein Amino Acids 10 December 2020
The prebiotic seas contained L- and D-amino acids, and non-Polar AAs and Polar AAs, and minerals could adsorb all these molecules. Besides amino acids, other molecules could be found in the primitive seas that competed for mineral adsorption sites. Here, we have a huge problem that could be a double-edged sword for prebiotic chemistry. On the one hand, this may lead to more complex prebiotic chemistry, due to the large variety of species, which could mean more possibilities for the formation of different and more complex molecules. On the other hand, this complex mixture of molecules may not lead to the formation of any important molecule or biopolymer in high concentration to be used for molecular evolution. Schwartz, in his article “Intractable mixtures and the origin of life”, has already addressed this problem, denominating this mixture the “gunk”. 5

Intractable Mixtures and the Origin of Life 2007
A problem which is familiar to organic chemists is the production of unwanted byproducts in synthetic reactions. For prebiotic chemistry, where the goal is often the simulation of conditions on the prebiotic Earth and the modeling of a spontaneous reaction, it is not surprising – but nevertheless frustrating – that the unwanted products may consume most of the starting material and lead to nothing more than an intractable mixture, or -gunk.. The most well-known examples of the phenomenon can be summarized quickly: Although the Miller –Urey reaction produces an impressive set of amino acids and other biologically significant compounds, a large fraction of the starting material goes into a brown, tar-like residue that remains uncharacterized; i.e., gunk. While 15% of the carbon can be traced to specific organic molecules, the rest seems to be largely intractable 

Even if we focus only on the soluble products, we still have to deal with an extremely complex mixture of compounds. The carbonaceous chondrites, which represent an alternative source of starting material for prebiotic chemistry on Earth, and must have added enormous quantities of organic material to the Earth at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), do not offer a solution to the problem just referred to. The organic material present in carbonaceous meteorites is a mixture of such complexity that much ingenuity has gone into the design of suitable extraction methods, to isolate the most important classes of soluble (or solubilized) components for analysis.

Whatever the exact nature of an RNA precursor which may have become the first selfreplicating molecule, how could the chemical homogeneity which seems necessary to permit this kind of mechanism to even come into existence have been achieved? What mechanism would have selected for the incorporation of only threose, or ribose, or any particular building block, into short oligomers which might later have undergone chemically selective oligomerization? Virtually all model prebiotic syntheses produce mixtures. 6

Life: What A Concept! https://jsomers.net/life.pdf
Craig Venter: To me the key thing about Darwinian evolution is selection. Biology is a hundred percent dependent on selection. No matter what we do in synthetic biology, synthetic genomes, we're doing selection. It's just not
natural selection anymore. It's an intelligently designed selection, so it's a unique subset. But selection is always part of it.
My comment: 
What natural mechanisms lack, is goal-directedness. And that's a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Why should competition and selection among them have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless? Selection is a scope and powerless mechanism  to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term, and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of order.

The problem of lack of a selection mechanism extends to the homochirality problem. 
A. G. CAIRNS-SMITH Seven clues to the origin of life, page 40:
It is one of the most singular features of the unity of biochemistry that this mere convention is universal. Where did such agreement come from? You see non-biological processes do not as a rule show any bias one way or the other, and it has proved particularly difficult to see any realistic way in which any of the constituents of a 'prebiotic soup' would have had predominantly 'left-handed' or right-handed' molecules. It is thus particularly difficult to see this feature as having been imposed by initial conditions.

In regards to the prebiotic synthesis of the basic building blocks of life, I list 23 problems directly related to the lack of a selection mechanism on the prebiotic earth. This is one of the unsolvable problems of abiogenesis. 
Selecting the right materials is absolutely essential. But a prebiotic soup of mixtures of impure chemicals would never purify and select those that are required for life. Chemicals and physical reactions have no "urge" to join, group, and start interacting in a purpose and goal-oriented way to produce molecules, that later on would perform specific functions, and generate self-replicating factories, full of machines, directed by specified, complex assembly information. This is not an argument from ignorance, incredulity, or gaps of knowledge.

William Dembski: The problem is that nature has too many options and without design couldn’t sort through all those options. The problem is that natural mechanisms are too unspecific to determine any particular outcome. Natural processes could theoretically form a protein, but also compatible with the formation of a plethora of other molecular assemblages, most of which have no biological significance. Nature allows them full freedom of arrangement. Yet it’s precisely that freedom that makes nature unable to account for specified outcomes of small probability. Nature, in this case, rather than being intent on doing only one thing, is open to doing any number of things. Yet when one of those things is a highly improbable specified event, design becomes the more compelling, better inference. Occam's razor also boils down to an argument from ignorance: in the absence of better information, you use a heuristic to accept one hypothesis over the other.
http://www.discovery.org/a/1256

Out of the 27 listed problems of prebiotic RNA synthesis, 8 are directly related to the lack of a mechanism to select the right ingredients.
1.How would prebiotic processes have purified the starting molecules to make RNA and DNA which were grossly impure? They would have been present in complex mixtures that contained a great variety of reactive molecules.
2.How did fortuitous accidents select the five just-right nucleobases to make DNA and RNA, Two purines, and three pyrimidines?
3.How did unguided random events select purines with two rings, with nine atoms, forming the two rings: 5 carbon atoms and 4 nitrogen atoms, amongst almost unlimited possible configurations?
4.How did stochastic coincidence select pyrimidines with one ring, with six atoms, forming its ring: 4 carbon atoms and 2 nitrogen atoms, amongst an unfathomable number of possible configurations?
5.How would these functional bases have been separated from the confusing jumble of similar molecules that would also have been made?
6.How could the ribose 5 carbon sugar rings which form the RNA and DNA backbone have been selected, if 6 or 4 carbon rings, or even more or less, are equally possible but non-functional?
7.How were the correct nitrogen atom of the base and the correct carbon atom of the sugar selected to be joined together?
8.How could right-handed configurations of RNA and DNA have been selected in a racemic pool of right and left-handed molecules? Ribose must have been in its D form to adopt functional structures ( The homochirality problem )

Out of the 27 listed problems of prebiotic amino acid synthesis, 13 are directly related to the lack of a mechanism to select the right ingredients.
1. How did unguided stochastic coincidence select the right amongst over 500 that occur naturally on earth?
2. How were bifunctional monomers, that is, molecules with two functional groups, so they combine with two others selected, and unifunctional monomers (with only one functional group) sorted out?
3. How could achiral precursors of amino acids have produced/selected and concentrated only left-handed amino acids? ( The homochirality problem )
4. How did the transition from prebiotic enantiomer selection to the enzymatic reaction of transamination occur that had to be extant when cellular self-replication and life began?
5. How would natural causes have selected twenty, and not more or less amino acids to make proteins?
6. How did natural events have foreknowledge that the selected amino acids are best suited to enable the formation of soluble structures with close-packed cores, allowing the presence of ordered binding pockets inside proteins?
7. How were bifunctional monomers, that is, molecules with two functional groups so they combine with two others selected, and unifunctional monomers (with only one functional group) sorted out?
8. How could achiral precursors of amino acids have produced and concentrated/selected only left-handed amino acids? (The homochirality problem)
9. How did the transition from prebiotic enantiomer selection to the enzymatic reaction of transamination occur that had to be extant when cellular self-replication and life began?
10. How would natural causes have selected twenty, and not more or less amino acids to make proteins?
11. How did natural events have foreknowledge that the selected amino acids are best suited to enable the formation of soluble structures with close-packed cores, allowing the presence of ordered binding pockets inside proteins?
12. How did nature "know" that the set of amino acids selected appears to be near ideal and optimal?

Out of the 12 listed problems of prebiotic cell membrane synthesis, 2 are directly related to the lack of a mechanism to select the right ingredients.
1. How did prebiotic processes select hydrocarbon chains which must be in the range of 14 to 18 carbons in length?  There was no physical necessity to form carbon chains of the right length nor hindrance to join chains of varying lengths. So they could have been existing of any size on the early earth.
2. How would random events start to produce biological membranes which are not composed of pure phospholipids, but instead are mixtures of several phospholipid species, often with a sterol admixture such as cholesterol? There is no feasible prebiotic mechanism to select/join the right mixtures.

Claim: Even if we take your unknowns as true unknowns or even unknowable, the answer is always going to be “We don’t know yet.”
Reply: Science HATES saying confessing "we don't know". Science is about knowing and getting knowledge and understanding. The scientists mind is all about getting knowledge and diminishing ignorance. Confessing of not knowing, when there is good reason for it, is ok. But claiming of not knowing, despite the evident facts easy at hand and having the ability to come to informed well-founded conclusions based on sound reasoning, and through known facts and evidence, is not only willful ignorance but plain foolishness. In special, when the issues in the discussion are related to origins and worldviews, and eternal destiny is at stake.  If there were hundreds of possible statements, then claiming of not knowing which makes most sense could be justified.  In the quest of origins and God, there are just two possible explanations. Either there is a God, or there is not a God. That's it. There is however a wealth of evidence in the natural world, which can lead us to informed, well-justified conclusions. We know for example that nature has no "urge" to select things and to complexify, but its natural course is to act upon the laws of thermodynamics, and molecules disintegrate. That is their normal course of action. To become less complex. Systems, given energy and left to themselves, DEVOLVE to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”.  The literature reports (to our knowledge) exactly  ZERO CONFIRMED OBSERVATIONS where evolution emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system. it is IMPOSSIBLE for any non-living chemical system to escape devolution to enter into the Darwinian world of the “living”. Such statements of impossibility apply even to macromolecules. Both monomers and polymers can undergo a variety of decomposition reactions that must be taken into account because biologically relevant molecules would undergo similar decomposition processes in the prebiotic environment.

CAIRNS-SMITH genetic takeover, page 70
Suppose that by chance some particular coacervate droplet in a primordial ocean happened to have a set of catalysts, etc. that could convert carbon dioxide into D-glucose. Would this have been a major step forward
towards life? Probably not. Sooner or later the droplet would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and never have been heard of again. It would not have mattered how ingenious or life-like some early system was; if it
lacked the ability to pass on to offspring the secret of its success then it might as well never have existed. So I do not see life as emerging as a matter of course from the general evolution of the cosmos, via chemical evolution, in one grand gradual process of complexification. Instead, following Muller (1929) and others, I would take a genetic View and see the origin of life as hinging on a rather precise technical puzzle. What would have been the easiest way that hereditary machinery could have formed on the primitive Earth?

Claim: That’s called the Sherlock fallacy. It's a false dichotomy
Reply: No. Life is either due to chance, or design. There are no other options.

One of the few biologists, Eugene Koonin, Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a recognized expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology, is honest enough to recognize that abiogenesis research has failed. He wrote in his book: The Logic of Chance page 351:
" Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure—we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. 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.

Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by demonstrating that competitors to that proposition are false. Either the origin of the basic building blocks of life and self-replicating cells are the result of the creative act by an intelligent designer, or the result of unguided random chemical reactions on the early earth. Science, rather than coming closer to demonstrate how life could have started, has not advanced and is further away to generating living cells starting with small molecules.  Therefore, most likely, cells were created by an intelligent designer.

I have listed  27 open questions in regard to the origin of RNA and DNA on the early earth, 27 unsolved problems in regard to the origin of amino acids on the early earth, 12 in regard to phospholipid synthesis, and also unsolved problems in regard to carbohydrate production. The open problems are in reality far greater. This is just a small list. It is not just an issue of things that have not yet been figured out by abiogenesis research, but deep conceptual problems, like the fact that there were no natural selection mechanisms in place on the early earth.   

Life's Origins
1. What was the Earth's physical environment like when life first evolved?
2.What sorts of chemical reactions could produce the building blocks of life and could these occur naturally in the early Earth's environment?
3. How could the complex organic molecules be compartmentalized into a contained unit?
4. How did the genetic code evolve? 6

Miller- Urey 1959:
Intermediate Stages in Chemical Evolution The major problems remaining for an understanding of the origin of life are (i) the synthesis of peptides, (ii) the synthesis of purines and pyrimidines, (iii) a mechanism by which "high-energy" phosphate or other types of bonds could be synthesized continuously, (iv) the synthesis of nucleotides and polynucleotides, (v) the synthesis of polypeptides with catalytic activity (enzymes), and (vi) the development of polynucleotides and the associated enzymes which are capable of self-duplication. This list of problems is based on the assumption that the first living organisms were similar in chemical composition and metabolism to the simplest living organisms still on the earth. 7

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cbdv.200790167
2. https://sci-hub.ren/10.1007/978-1-4939-1468-5_27
3. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1511/1511.00698.pdf
4. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2Fb136268
5. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/12/2046
6. Life's Origins https://www2.gwu.edu/~darwin/BiSc151/Origin/origin.html
7. MILLER & UREY: Organic Compound Synthesis on the Primitive Earth: Several questions about the origin of life have been answered, but much remains to be studied 31 Jul 1959



Last edited by Otangelo on Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:54 am; edited 56 times in total

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The trajectory from a prebiotic synthesis of the basic building blocks of life, to the sophisticated synthesis by cell factories: an unsolved riddle


Modern cells use vast resources of information, basic elements of matter, and energy, to synthesize the four basic building blocks: 

1. Amino acids  
2. Nucleotides 
3. Carbohydrates  
4. phospholipids. 

These individual components are themselves complex, and very specific, and the cell machinery uses several highly sophisticated and controlled metabolic pathways to synthesize them, where both, anabolism, and catabolism play a role, that is, de-novo synthesis, and recycling. This requires a minimal genome, proteome, and metabolome. Sophisticated signaling networks are constantly in use to detect the required quantities based on the external availability of food and to maintain intracellular homeostasis.  Obviously, this ultrasophisticated chemical factory was not extant on the early earth. 

Modern abiogenesis research focusses on attempting to elucidate how these basic molecules could have emerged by chemical evolution on the early earth, prior to the emergence of the modern chemical cell factories that all life forms use. In almost 70 years, rather than making progress to solve the riddle, general frustration is the case. 

Steve Benner, one of the world’s leading authorities on abiogenesis, summed it up:
We are now 60 years into the modern era of prebiotic chemistry. That era has produced tens of thousands of papers attempting to define processes by which “molecules that look like biology” might arise from “molecules that do not look like biology” …. For the most part, these papers report “success” in the sense that those papers define the term…. And yet, the problem remains unsolved

In the following, I am outlining a MINIMAL number of enzymes involved in synthesizing these building blocks. Not taken into consideration, is all the machinery, that is involved synthesizing the co-factors, metal clusters, metal import channels, chaperones, etc. that are required to get functional proteins.   

Nucleotides
Folate is necessary for the production and maintenance of new cells, for DNA synthesis and RNA synthesis through methylation. The synthesis of NADPH requires six enzymes5 Six proteins are required in the folate pathway. 4 

RNA 
Nucleotides are building blocks for DNA and RNA. Three Pyrimidines and Two Purines Are Commonly Found in Cells.
The pyrimidine synthesis pathway requires six regulated steps, seven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP.
The starting material for purine biosynthesis is Ribose 5-phosphate, a product of the highly complex pentose phosphate pathway, which uses 12 enzymes1 
De novo purine synthesis pathway requires ten regulated steps, eleven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP. 

DNA
The replacement of RNA as the repository of genetic information by its more stable cousin, DNA, provides a more reliable way of transmitting information. DNA uses thymine (T) as one of its four informational bases, whereas RNA uses uracil (U)
At the C2' position of ribose, an oxygen atom is removed. The remarkable enzymes that do this are named Ribonucleotide reductases (RNR) The iron-dependent enzyme is essential for DNA synthesis, and most essential enzymes of life 32, and it has one of the most sophisticated allosteric regulations known today. 50 
The thymine-uracil exchange constitutes one of the major chemical differences between DNA and RNA. Before being incorporated into the chromosomes, this essential modification takes place. Uracil bases in RNA are transformed into thymine bases in DNA. The synthesis of thymine requires seven enzymesDe novo biosynthesis of thymine is an intricate and energetically expensive process. 
All in all, not considering the metabolic pathways and enzymes required to make the precursors to start RNA and DNA synthesis requires at least 26  enzymes.  

Amino Acids
Several classes of reactions play special roles in the biosynthesis of amino acids and nucleotides
(1) transamination reactions and other rearrangements promoted by enzymes containing pyridoxal phosphate (PLP), which requires eight enzymes to be synthesized. 3
(2) transfer of one-carbon groups, with either tetrahydrofolate or S-adenosylmethionine as a cofactor; tetrahydrofolate is derived from the folate pathway, 
(3) transfer of amino groups derived from the amide nitrogen of glutamine.

As implied by the root of the word (amine), the key atom in amino acid composition is nitrogen. All organisms contain the enzymes glutamate dehydrogenase and glutamine synthetase, which convert ammonia to glutamate and glutamine, respectively.
Number of enzymes required to synthesize the life-essential amino acids:

1. Glycine requires five enzymes 6, 7
2. Alanine can be obtained by three different synthesis pathways, and the number of enzymes is speculative. At least a transamination reaction is required, so i will put one enzyme. 8
3. Valine is derived from Pyruvate. Pyruvic acid can be made from glucose through glycolysis. 2 Nine enzymes are required to go from Glucose to pyruvate. A further pathway required three enzymes is required. 9 
4. Leucine The biosynthesis pathways of the branched-chain amino acids (valine, isoleucine and leucine) all begin with the same precursors (pyruvate or pyruvate and 2-ketobutyrate). Subsequently, four enzymes are required. 10 
5. Isoleucine The isoleucine pathway is almost the same as the valine biosynthesis pathway. 11
6. Methionine requires 4 enzymes, plus Vitamin B12  thirty enzymes are necessary for one of nature’s largest characterized biosynthetic pathways. 12
7. Proline: three enzymes are required in the pathway
8. Phenylalanineone enzyme is needed. 13
9. Tryptophan biosynthesis is a biologically expensive, complicated process. In fact, the products of four other pathways are essential contributors of carbon or nitrogen during tryptophan formation. Thirteen enzymes are used 14
10. Serine requires three enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 15
11. Threonine requires five enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 16
12. Asparagine requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 17
13. Glutamine requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway  18
14. Tyrosine requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 19
15. Cysteine requires one enzyme in its biosynthesis pathway 20
16. Lysine requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 21
17. Methionine requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 22
18. Threonine requires one enzyme in its biosynthesis pathway 23
19. Arginine requires eight enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 24
20. Aspartate requires two enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 25
21. Glutamate requires one enzyme in its biosynthesis pathway 26
22. Histidine requires eight enzymes in its biosynthesis pathway 27

A minimum of 112 enzymes are required to synthesize the 20 (+2) amino acids used in proteins

Carbohydrates
The last universal common ancestor, LUCA, supposedly used the simplest and most ancient of the six known pathways of CO2 fixation, called the acetyl–CoA (or Wood–Ljungdahl) pathway. It uses nine enzymes. 

Membranes
At least 74 enzymes are required for phospholipid synthesis in prokaryotes 29

The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know
A detailed understanding of that process will have to wait until ongoing studies in systems chemistry reveal both the classes of chemical materials and the kinds of chemical pathways that simple replicating systems are able to follow in their drive towards greater complexity and replicative stability.

Paul Davies, the fifth miracle page 53:
Pluck the DNA from a living cell and it would be stranded, unable to carry out its familiar role. Only within the context of a highly specific molecular milieu will a given molecule play its role in life. To function properly, DNA must be part of a large team, with each molecule executing its assigned task alongside the others in a cooperative manner. Acknowledging the interdependability of the component molecules within a living organism immediately presents us with a stark philosophical puzzle. If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place? Since most large molecules needed for life are produced only by living organisms, and are not found outside the cell, how did they come to exist originally, without the help of a meddling scientist? Could we seriously expect a Miller-Urey type of soup to make them all at once, given the hit-and-miss nature of its chemistry?

On the Development Towards the Modern World: A Plausible Role of Uncoded Peptides in the RNA World 5
2009
Arguably one of the most outstanding problems in understanding the progress of early life is the transition from the RNA world to the modern protein-based world. One of the main requirements of this transition is the emergence of mechanism to produce functionally meaningful peptides and later, proteins. What could have served as the driving force for the production of peptides and what would have been their properties and purpose in the RNA world?

My comment: I have simplified the illustration, just to give an idea of the problem. In reality, a minimal, fully operational cell requires FAR many more enzymes than just what was mentioned above. But it shows the unbridgeable gap.

1. On the one side, we have the putative prebiotic soup with the random chaotic floating around of the basic building blocks of life, and on the other side,  the first living self-replicating cell ( LUCA ), a supposed fully operational minimal self-replicating cell, using the highly specific and sophisticated molecular milieu with a large team of enzymes which catalyze the reactions to produce the four basic building blocks of life in a cooperative manner, and furthermore, able to maintain intracellular homeostasis, reproduce, obtaining energy and converting it into a usable form, getting rid of toxic waste, protecting itself from dangers of the environment, doing the cellular repair, and communicate.  
2. The science paper: Structural analyses of a hypothetical minimal metabolism proposes a minimal number of 50 enzymatic steps catalyzed by the associated encoded proteins. They don't, however, include the steps to synthesize the 20 amino acids required in life. Including those, the minimal metabolome would consist of 221 enzymes & proteins. A large number of molecular machines, co-factors, scaffold proteins, and chaperones are not included, required to build this highly sophisticated chemical factory.
3. There simply no feasible viable prebiotic route to go from a random prebiotic soup to this minimal proteome to kick-start metabolism by unguided means. This is not a conclusion by ignorance & incredulity, but it is reasonable to be skeptic, that this irreducibly complex biological system, entire factory complexes composed of myriads of interconnected highly optimized production lines, full of computers and robots could emerge naturally defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of random unguided events and physical necessity. Comparing the two competing hypotheses, chance vs intelligent design, the second is simply by far the more case-adequate & reasonable explanation.  


1. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2172-the-pentose-phosphate-pathway
2. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1796-glycolysis
3. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2590p25-origins-what-cause-explains-best-our-existence-and-why#5938
4. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2590p25-origins-what-cause-explains-best-our-existence-and-why#5942
5. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2708-nicotinamide-adenine-dinucleotide-nad-in-origin-of-life-scenarios
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Amino_acid_metabolism_enzymes
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#Biosynthesis
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alanine#Biosynthesis
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valine#Synthesis
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucine#Synthesis_in_non-human_organisms
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoleucine#Biosynthesis
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionine#Biosynthesis
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylalanine
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan#Biosynthesis_and_industrial_production
15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serine#Synthesis_and_industrial_production
16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threonine#Biosynthesis
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagine#Biosynthesis
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamine
19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrosine#Biosynthesis
20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine
21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine
22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionine#Biosynthesis
23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threonine#Metabolism
24. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1740-amino-acids-origin-of-the-canonical-twenty-amino-acids-required-for-life#6063
25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartic_acid#Biosynthesis
26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter)#Biosynthesis
27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histidine#Biosynthesis
28. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2967-fatty-acid-and-phospholipid-biosynthesis-in-prokaryotes
29. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2967-fatty-acid-and-phospholipid-biosynthesis-in-prokaryotes

https://manet.illinois.edu/pathways.php

The Stairway to Life - Rob Stadler, PhD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC7yOrUdf9M&t=2203s

Either life emerged by a fortuitous blind purposeless accident by chance, spontaneously by unguided random stochastic coincidence, natural events that turned into self-organization in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological, purely physico-dynamic kinetic processes and reactions influenced by environmental parameters, or thought up, planned, and manufactured through the words of the necessary direct intervention, intention, creative force and activity of an intelligent cognitive agency, a powerful creator.

What natural mechanisms lack, is goal-directedness. And that's a big problem for naturalistic explanations of the origin of life. There was a potentially unlimited variety of molecules on the prebiotic earth. Why should competition and selection among them have occurred at all, to promote a separation of those molecules that are used in life, from those that are useless? Selection is a scope and powerless  mechanism  to explain all of the living order, and even the ability to maintain order in the short term, and to explain the emergence, overall organization, and long-term persistence of life from non-living precursors. It is an error of false conceptual reduction to suppose that competition and selection  will thereby be the source of explanation for all relevant forms of order.

The properties of stone blocks do not determine their arrangement in the construction of buildings. Similarly, the properties of biological building blocks do not determine the arrangement of monomers in functional information-bearing  DNA and RNA polypeptides, nor protein strands. DNA base sequencing cannot be explained by chance nor physical necessity any more than the information in a newspaper headline can be explained by reference to the chemical properties of ink. Nor can the conventions of the genetic code that determine the assignments between nucleotide triplets and amino acids during translation be explained in this manner. The genetic code functions as a grammatical convention in a human language.

- Dr Edward Peltzer PhD. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute), Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry.
“As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry -- and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far…
“But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons, I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area."

Norio Kitadai:  Origins of building blocks of life: A review 12 August 2017
To date, various environments have been proposed as plausible sites for life’s origin, including oceans, lakes, lagoons, tidal pools, submarine hydrothermal systems, etc. But no single setting can offer enough chemical and physical diversity for life to originate.
https://moodle2.units.it/pluginfile.php/359629/mod_resource/content/1/1-s2.0-S1674987117301305-main.pdf

Michael Denton: The miracle of the Cell:
Where the cosmos feels infinitely large and the atomic realm infinitely small, the cell feels infinitely complex. They appear in so many ways supremely fit to fulfill their role as the basic unit of biological life.

Atoms and molecules are just as happy to be as they are. They don't NEED schooling, don't need Families. Higher levels of structures for SURVIVAL are never needed. Atoms never need DNA programming to function. They don't need Molecular machinery to exist. Life is not even supposed to be here. There is no NEED for it to exist. It is not natural, and would of itself with high probability never came about.

No scientific experiment has been able to come even close to synthesize the basic building blocks of life, and reproduce a  self-replicating Cell in the Laboratory through self-assembly and autonomous organization.

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.

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.

Re-conceptualizing the origins of life  2017 Dec 28
The origin of life is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in science. It is also notorious for being one of the most difficult. It is now almost 100 years since scientific efforts to solve the problem began in earnest, with the work of Oparin and Haldane.  ‘Bottom-up’ approaches have not yet generated anything nearly as complex as a living cell. At most, we are lucky to generate short polypeptides or polynucleotides or simple vesicles—a far cry from the complexity of anything living.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5686397/?fbclid=IwAR0jkHj-5MnRw5MMgm6xijPFMWlPbbQ5XOlkC9ZmFsE645yl-5zjrQgs4HQ

One must state it plainly.
Atheism started in the age of supposed enlightenment and reason, two hundred years ago.  Darwinian thought comes from the Victorian era, from a time where it was believed that biological Cells could be conceived, as Darwin claimed,  as coming from some warm little pond with all sort of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.... So basically, from the pre-history of biological sciences, where nobody had an idea what was going on.

Today we know better. Nonetheless, strange. That so many fight to keep a belief that has been overturned by science, cells are not simple structureless bits of protoplasm, but of unparalleled gigantic complexity, a city, hosting billions of interconnected chemical factories, unimaginable for the human mind. Full of computers, information, machines, and factories. Fully automated, robot-like operated, enormously well suited to adapt to the environment. Such things come undoubtedly from a super-intelligent creator.

Science provides us with evidence. Based on it, we can make post-dictions in regard to the past.  Historical sciences cannot go back with a time-machine and observe what happened back in the past. As such, abiogenesis, cannot be demonstrated in as much as ID/creationism. This is not a dispute between religion and science, but good interpretations of the scientific evidence, and inadequate interpretations, which do eventually not fit well the data.

One of the aspects that have to be explained in regards to the origin of life is the origin of the enormous amounts of data necessary from the set go. The smallest free-living bacteria, the representative for the minimal complexity which would have been the threshold of transition from non-life to life ( below that threshold, self-replicating free-living cells could not be alive) requires 1,3 million nucleotides. Chance to get a functional instructional complex codified sequence of nucleotides of that magnitude,  randomly on early earth is over 10^700,000 ( there are 10^80 atoms in the universe). That is far beyond what is possible.   Instructions, complex codified specifications, INFORMATION. Algorithms encoded in genetic and epigenetic languages and communication channels and networks. Genes, and epigenetic signaling through various signaling networks provide cues and instruct molecules and macromolecule complexes, and scaffold networks interpret and react in a variety of ways upon decoding and data processing of those instructions. Since signaling pathways work synergetically integrated with a complex short and long-range cross-talk between intracellular macromolecules, these instructions could not be the result of a random gradual increase of information. These information networks only operate and work in an integrated fashion, and had to be fully set up right from the beginning. Conveying codes, a system of rules to convert information, such as letters and words, into another form, and translation ciphers of one language to another are always sourced back to intelligent set-up. What we see in biochemistry is complex instructional codified information being stored through the genetic code ( codons) in a storage medium (DNA), encoded ( DNA polymerase), sent (mRNA), and decoded ( Ribosome). Life is an all or nothing business. The stories of protocells and a gradual emergence of those by chemical evolution are pseudo-science.

Wilhelm Huck:  chemistprofessor 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

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.

===============================================================================================================================================
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")

===============================================================================================================================================

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.

===============================================================================================================================================

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: pp. xii, xiv 1992 
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. 


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?

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. 

Jeremy England: Empirical experience and common sense both tell us that it is much easier to get more biological complexity from some amount of it than it is to get some of it from none.

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?
Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning

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.

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

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe
From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information cannot in our view be generated by what are often called 'natural' processes, as for instance through meteorological and chemical processes. . . Information was also needed. We have argued that the requisite information came from an 'intelligence'.
Evolution from Space (1981), p. 148, 150

Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
"It is quite a shock. From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it.  I now find myself driven to this position by logic. There is no other way in which we can understand the precise ordering of the chemicals of life except to invoke the creations on a cosmic scale. . . .  We were hoping as scientists that there would be a way round our conclusion, but there isn't.
"There Must Be A God," Daily Express, Aug. 14, 1981 and Hoyle on Evolution, Nature, Nov. 12, 1981, p. 105

Carl Sagan, astronomer, "Life," in 10 Encyclopedia Britannica: Macromedia, 15th ed.
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974), 893-894:

A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frenetic activity. On a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an enormous rate. . . . The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

What if I told you, I believed it possible (not probable but possible) that a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia could come together without assistance from intelligence given enough time in the universe. Would you think me to be a logical person?

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. 


===============================================================================================================================================

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.

===============================================================================================================================================

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

===============================================================================================================================================

Current origin of life proposals:
http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t2468-current-origin-of-life-proposals

It may be that if the origin of life occurred as a natural chemical process on Earth, the first step was the formation of the autocatalytic vesicles, which were short-lived and formed over and over again in different varieties over millions of years – chemical experiments that failed repeatedly. 26 However, at some point a vesicle system exhibited the property of producing polymers of a dominantly single chirality, either sugars or amino acids, and within this system, the production of an RNA, a PNA, or other nucleic acid structure (ONA) was enabled. 1

My comment: There is no experimental evidence that it is possible. The homochirality problem persists until today. So that's just baseless speculation and wishful thinking. 

ONA varieties with catalytic capability became coupled into the autocatalytic networks of some vesicles, and a subset of these used the energy and catalytic properties of the sets to reproduce. Such symbiosis, which
is a theme in the evolution of life, could have represented the very primitive precursor to a biological cell. All of the ingredients, of a cellular structure capable of maintaining and reproducing itself are present in such an RNA-primed vesicle.

Although from here, the formation of DNA is not well understood either, the jump in complexity from RNA to DNA is not considered by biochemists to be as much of a hurdle. 

My comment: So they dont know how the transition happened, nonetheless they know it was not much of a hurdle.... amazing !! 

Along the way, in some RNA-driven vesicle, DNA may have arisen, and the universal cellular ancestor of all Earthly life was born.

The figure above suggests two ways to look at the origin-of-life issue. One, on the left, is to try to list the steps, in order, by which life began; this approach is fraught with dissent because we still do not know whether vesicles, RNA, ONA, chirality, or other precursors came first. 

My comment: Maybe they emerged all together, assembled by an intelligent creator? 

(For example, Nobel Laureate C. de Duve notes that the development of energy storage in phosphorus-bearing molecules such as adenosine triphosphate [ATP] is yet another problem that requires the identification of simpler precursor molecules.) The other approach is to recognize that biology represents a self-controlled selection of a subset of possible molecules out of an enormous range of possibilities. DNA, for example, has four kinds of letters and about 1,000,000 base pairs (ladder rungs) per molecule. The number of possible varieties of DNA molecules then is 4^1,000,000, or 4 followed by one million zeros. It is the role of enzymes, biological catalysts, to suppress the random nature of chemical reactions so as to preserve and ensure a particular suite of biological molecules at the rate needed to sustain the production and replication of the whole system.

My comment: It's hard to make a case for natural causes, without smuggling teleology into the explanation of how it might have happened. So did enzymes have the inborn drive and need to " preserve and ensure a particular suite of biological molecules "? If so, why? 

The prebiotic Earth was a system of high chemical diversity, but with an environment that tended to select certain elements and naturally occurring molecules as preferred in increasingly complicated autocatalytic chemical
systems. 

My comment: Why would the environment have a drive or goal to select certain elements for autocatalysis? 

Reaction sets that straddle the barrier between biology and chemistry were still chemically diverse, and likely limited in size and capability to interact with the environment: morphologically (appearance-wise) simple. It is the bottleneck of morphologically simple, protobiotic chemical systems that lies at the crux of understanding how life began. As one kind of reliable protobiochemistry took hold, the chemical diversity of protobiology plummeted, but the success of the system was such as to allow the blossoming of a great diversity of morphologies that functionally allowed different kinds of interactions with a changing environment. Today, biological processes have coopted
most of the available carbon and oxygen in the atmosphere, ocean, and continental surface of Earth, so that the chemistry of these elements is largely limited to the rather uniform and specific biochemical processes that sustain life. Most or all of the other planetary environments in our solar system may never have crossed this bottleneck, but how close they came is an intriguing question 

At least in terms of structural complexity of the container of living processes, it does not seem like such a long step from the vesicles of the theorists to the bacterial prokaryotes of the Archean.



Last edited by Otangelo on Thu Jan 12, 2023 11:39 am; edited 27 times in total

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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:
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2227/

That means, a minimal number of genes, proteins, and the 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:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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 hudge problem for natural mechanisms, where no intelligence is in place.

A minimal metabolic set was also required:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2371-how-cellular-enzymatic-and-metabolic-networks-point-to-design

A preeminent proposal, the so often mentioned RNA world, has also unbridgeable flaws, and cannot explain the origin of life adequately:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2221-the-hardware-and-software-of-the-cell-evidence-of-design?highlight=hardware

Amongst many other catch22 situations that plague OOL researchers:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2059-catch22-chicken-and-egg-problems-in-biology-and-biochemistry

Furthermore, you need homeostasis and a functional signaling network right from the start:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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 ?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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 preeminently 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.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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:
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/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 innumerous 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 by a lucky accident.

Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible

=========================================================================================================================================================

The Last Universal Common Ancestor: emergence, constitution and genetic legacy of an elusive forerunner
Since the reclassification of all life forms in three Domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya), the identity of their alleged forerunner (Last Universal Common Ancestor or LUCA) has been the subject of extensive controversies: progenote or already complex organism, prokaryote or protoeukaryote, thermophile or mesophile, product of a protracted progression from simple replicators to complex cells or born in the cradle of "catalytically closed" entities? We present a critical survey of the topic and suggest a scenario.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2478661/

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

Why is the Emergence of Life an Unlikely Event
This is best explained by trying to list some of the most important problems which life needed to overcome (with some base of explanation): The self-replicating RNA paradox: How to copy the active center?
– Maybe there were multiple RNAs replicating each other in a cycle, or an RNA forming a palindrome. Where to get the mononucleotides from initially? The membrane paradox: How to live without a membrane which prevents intermediate metabolic molecules to diffuse away? But how to live with a membrane which prevents energy-rich molecules to enter the cell?

– The first membranes might only consist of fatty acids [57] and not of glycerol esters or ethers. Those membranes still let pass hydrophilic molecules and even species with a single electric charge. But they do not let pass energy rich polyphosphates or RNA, allowing for a multi-molecule replicating cycle and keeping catalytic RNAs close to their genome [57]. However, the high Mg2+ concentrations needed for RNA polymerization lead to crystallization of the fatty acid magnesium salt [57]. So there must be something else than Mg2+
.
The ribosome paradox: How can it be that the most ancient system of life is the most complex one?
– Maybe because big multi macromolecule complexes simply evolve slower than individual macromolecules.
– Maybe it is a rest of an ancient feature of life without membranes. Spontaneous formation of RNA RNA based RNA polymerization Synthesis of all 20 amino acids. This requires about 60 different enzymes in the organisms
living today (without the enzymes of the basic metabolism shared with carbohydrates) Synthesis of the nucleotides. This requires about 20 enzymes in the organisms living today (not counting the enzymes to create ribose or the amino acids used). Synthesis of the most basic membranes. This requires about 9 enzymes in Archaea and at least 4 enzymes in Bacteria (without synthesis of the polar head groups and glycerol) A basic metabolism to obtain energy The author does not claim that there is no way to overcome those obstacles and expect that research will resolve those issues. But one should keep in mind that spontaneous emergence of life is not obvious at all.

http://darwins-god.blogspot.com.br/2013/03/here-is-why-dna-code-is-problem.html
Life cannot come from non-life. The cell contains literally, not allegorically, coded information. The cell is like a computer, it contains hardware ( the cell nucleus, ribozymes, nucleotides etc. which are the hardware ) and coded information, through the special arrangement of the nucleotides, which code for proteins. Codified , complex, specified information, as stored in DNA, can only come from a mind. There are not known any natural mechanisms, upon which coded information can arise. Based on this premise, we can deduce logically and securely, the coded information in DNA comes from a mind. Minds can exist outside of physical body, as many NDE scientific experiments have shown. Therefore we have very strong evidence, that a supermind exists, which made all that exists.

Random chance, or design ?
http://goddidit.org/dna/
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the molecule that stores genetic information. It is found in almost every cell of every living thing on the planet. As you read the following information about dna ask yourself this question: could randomness and time produce this?

Incredible storage capacity
The information storage capacity of DNA is vast; a microgram (one millionth of a gram) of DNA theoretically could store as much information as 1 million compact discs. And all that storage is packed into a cell nucleus, whose volume is only a few millionths of a cubic metre!
Is it feasible that a storage mechanism better than anything man has made can come about by purely naturalistic means?

Replication
For a cell to divide it must first replicate it’s dna.
Watch this amazing simulation of dna replication:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jtmOZaIvS0
Incredible right?
All cells must replicate for an organism to survive. How did the replication machinery come into existence?
How does the machinery know how to unwind the dna?
How does the machinery know that one of the strands is backwards? and that it has to copy it in loops?

DNA repair
Unfortunately the dna in cells gets damaged everyday by such things as uv light and radiation. Fortunately, we have special machines that can repair our dna. So far, 130 repair mechanisms have been identified.
With 3 billion letters in the dna strand there is a lot of checking to be done. Amazingly, unbroken DNA will conduct electricity, while an error will block the current. One pair of enzymes lock onto different parts of a DNA strand. One of them sends an electron down the strand. If the DNA is unbroken, the electron reaches the other enzyme, and causes it to detach. I.e. this process scans the region of DNA between them, and if it’s clean, there is no need for repairs.

But if there is a break, the electron doesn’t reach the second enzyme. This enzyme then moves along the strand until it reaches the error, and fixes it. This mechanism of repair seems to be present in all living things, from bacteria to man.
How did a repair mechanism evolve to check the electrical conductivity of the dna?
DNA is being damaged all the time therefore dna and dna repair had to evolve at the same time?

DNA is code
DNA is made up of 4 chemicals: Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine. These 4 chemicals are the letters (A,T,C and G) of the dna code language. The human dna code is 3 billion letters long.
Although DNA code is remarkably complex,it’s the information translation system connected to that code that really baffles evolutionists. Like any language, letters and words mean nothing outside the language convention used to give those letters and words meaning. For example, you can read the information on this page because there is a common understanding or agreement of what the words mean. However, this page will be gibberish to anyone who does not know how to read english. It’s the same with dna and proteins. The instructions for how to build proteins are built into the dna. The machine that builds the proteins has to read the instructions but it can only do that if it understands the meaning of the instructions…

Protein sysnthesis
Cells need to make proteins for pretty much everything they do. The DNA contains the instructions for how to build proteins. Watch this amazing simulation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erOP76_qLWA
Isn’t that astounding? Just some questions that should be asked:
How did the instructions to make the required protein get into the dna?
How does the ‘rna polymerase’ know where in the dna to find the instructions to make the required protein?
How does the ‘rna polymerase’ know how to unwind the dna?
How does the ‘rna polymerase’ know to make a copy of the instructions?
How does the ‘rna polymerase’ know what a ‘stop code’ means?
How does the ribosome understand the instructions on the ‘messenger rna’?
If accurate folding of the protein is essential then how did the Chaperonin know the right way to fold the protein?
DNA is required to make proteins… but proteins are required to build proteins from the dna instructions. So, which came first?
Based on these scientific facts, i infere, DNA is designed.

Information needs a source or an Informant. The code needs a Code Maker. Messages need an Author. This is based on our uniform and repeated experience that intelligent complex information clearly needs a source so "why" would be impose a "bias" against that Intelligent Source?

Literature from those who posture in favor of creation abounds with examples of the tremendous odds against chance producing a meaningful code. For instance, 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. Yet, 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.

Protocell Research: on the Verge of. . . a Dead End

DNA - THE LANGUAGE OF GOD - ANALOGOUS TO A COMPUTER PROGRAM & PROGRAMMER

British philosopher, Dr. Antony Flew, was a leading spokesperson for militant atheism. However, scientific discoveries within the last 30 years brought him to a conclusion he could not avoid. In a video interview in December 2004 he stated, "Super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature." Prominent in his conclusion were the discoveries of DNA. Here's why. DNA in our cells is very similar to an intricate computer program. In the photo on the left, you see that a computer program is made up of a series of ones and zeros (called binary code). The sequencing and ordering of these ones and zeros is what makes the computer program work properly. In the same way, DNA is made up of four chemicals, abbreviated as letters A, T, G, and C. Much like the ones and zeros, these letters are arranged in the human cell like this: CGTGTGACTCGCTCCTGAT and so on. The order in which they are arranged instructs the cell's actions. What is amazing is that within the tiny space in every cell in your body, this code is three billion letters long!! To grasp the amount of DNA information in one cell, "a live reading of that code at a rate of three letters per second would take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night." Wait, there's more. It has been determined that 99.9% of your
DNA is similar to everyone's genetic makeup. What is uniquely you comes in the fractional difference in how those three billion letters are sequenced in your cells. The U.S. government is able to identify everyone in our country by the arrangement of a nine-digit social security number. Yet, inside every cell in you is a three-billion-lettered DNA structure that belongs only to you. This code identifies you and continually instructs your cells' behaviour.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project (that mapped the human DNA structure) and founder of The BioLogos Foundation, said that one can "think of DNA as an instructional script, a software program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell." Perry Marshall, an information specialist, comments on the implications of this. "There has never existed a computer program that wasn't designed...[whether it is] a code, or a program, or a message given through a language, there is always an intelligent mind behind it." Just as former militant atheist Dr. Antony Flew questioned, it is legitimate to ask oneself regarding this three billion letter code instructing the cell...who wrote this script? Who placed this working code, inside the cell? It's like walking along the beach and you see in the sand, "Mike loves Michelle." You know the waves rolling up on the beach didn't form that--a person wrote that. It is a precise message. It is clear communication. In the same way, the DNA structure is a complex, three-billion-lettered script, informing and directing the cell's process.
How can one explain this sophisticated messaging, coding, residing in our cells? On June 26, 2000, President Clinton congratulated those who completed the human genome sequencing. President Clinton said, "Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift." Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, followed Clinton to the podium stating, "It is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." When looking at the DNA structure within the human body, we cannot escape the presence of purposeful design. According to the Holy Bible, God is not only the Author of our existence, but He is the Relationship that makes our existence meaningful. All the intangibles in life that we crave...enough strength for any situation, joy, wisdom, and knowing we are loved...God alone gives these to us as we listen to Him and trust Him. He is our greatest, reliable guide in life. Just as He has engineered DNA to instruct the cell, He offers to instruct us to make our lives function well, for His glory and for our sake, because He loves us.

Scientists not only have been unable to find a single undisputed link that clearly connects two of the hundreds of major family groups, but they have not even been able to produce a plausible starting point for their hypothetical evolutionary chain (Shapiro, 1986). The first links—actually the first hundreds of thousands or more links that are required to produce life—still are missing (Behe, 1996, pp. 154-156)!

The major links in the molecules-to-man theory that must be bridged include:
Evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules,
Evolution of complex molecules into simple organic molecules,
Evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules,
eventual Evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and
eventually Evolution into the first cells.
This process requires multimillions of links, all which either are missing or controversial. Scientists even lack plausible just-so stories for most of Evolution.
http://www.lifesorigin.com/

http://www.creationtoday.org/was-early-earths-atmosphere-different/

Life cannot evolve with oxygen.
Life cannot evolve without oxygen.
The many experiments to try to make life in the last fifty-five years have all ended in failure. Science is nowhere close to creating life.
All experiments demonstrate that we are even further from creating life than imagined.
Evidence shows that the earth has always had oxygen, even more than today.

http://www.studytoanswer.net/origins/abiogenesis.html#clays
Even evolution's most ardent advocate, Richard Dawkins, admitted in 2009 that
"the most profound unsolved problem in biology is the origin of life itself."

I.L. Cohen: At that moment, when the RNA/DNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt.

as we are at origins of life, the favourite resort, to the astonishing claimed powers of “natural selection” is off the table. Why? Because there is no code based genetic reproduction to have differential reproductive success that rewards superior genetic varieties.  Second, this is the root of the Darwinist tree of life, and no roots, no trunk, no shoots and no branches.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/irreducible-complexity/andre-asks-an-excellent-question-regarding-dna-as-a-part-of-an-in-cell-irreducibly-complex-communication-system/

http://www.detectingdesign.com/abiogenesis.html
what selective advantage would be gained for non-thinking atoms and molecules to form a living thing?  They really gain nothing from this process so why would a mindless non-directed Nature select to bring life into existence?  Natural selection really isn't a valid force at this point in time since there really is no conceivable advantage for mindless molecules to interact as parts of a living thing verses parts of an amorphous rock or a collection of sludge.  Even if a lot of fully formed proteins and strings of fully formed DNA molecules were to come together at the same time, what are the odds that all the hundreds and thousands of uniquely specified proteins needed to decode both the DNA and mRNA, (not to mention the needed ATP molecules and the host of other unlisted "parts"), would all simultaneously fuse together in such a highly functional way?  Not only has this phenomenon never been reproduced by any scientist in any laboratory on earth, but a reasonable mechanism by which such a  phenomenon might even occur has never been proposed - outside of intelligent design that is.

A law of nature could not alone explain how life began, because no conceivable law would compel a legion of atoms to follow precisely a prescribed sequence of assemblage.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/davies-miracle.html

Evolutionist George Wald reflected on this dilemma and wrote
"The reasonable view [during the two centuries before Louis Pasteur] was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.

If naturalistic molecules-to-human-life evolution were true, multibillions of links are required to bridge modern humans with the chemicals that once existed in the hypothetical “primitive soup”.  This putative soup, assumed by many scientists to have given birth to life over 3.5 billion years ago, was located in the ocean or mud puddles.  Others argue that the origin of life could not have been in the sea but rather must have occurred in clay on dry land.  Still others conclude that abiogenesis was more likely to have occurred in hot vents.  It is widely recognized that major scientific problems exist with all naturalistic origin of life scenarios.  This is made clear in the conclusions of many leading origin-of-life researchers.  A major aspect of the abiogenesis question is “What is the minimum number of parts necessary for an autotrophic free living organism to live, and could these parts assemble by naturalistic means?”  Research shows that at the lowest level this number is in the multimillions, producing an irreducible level of complexity that cannot be bridged by any known natural means.
http://www.trueorigin.org/abio.asp

The whole notion of abiogenesis is a construction built by evolutionists so that they can dismiss the whole notion of God from the generation of life. Rather than a supernatural being creating the life found on this earth through His own Wisdom, evolutionists seek to find an entirely naturalistic means by which to explain the existence of life on this planet. Yet, as seen above, the whole notion of abiogenesis rests upon an exceedingly weak foundation which is actually contrary to much of the scientific knowledge which we actually have obtained through extensive experimentation. Abiogenesis, in fact, violates several basic principles of chemistry and biochemistry which are so universally held as to be axiomatic. To get around these difficulties, evolutionary scientists have turned to various means of modifying their basic abiogenetic theory so as to resolve one or another of the problems presented. Yet, while pointing to directing clays, undersea thermal vents, interstellar amino acid generation, or several of the other more esoteric and generally dismissed theories, evolutionists manage to resolve (or often, just give the illusion of resolving, in the popular image framed by the media) one problem, while yet failing to address the other difficulties.Thus, abiogenesis, as far as can be seen from the actual experimental work and knowledge (apart from any concern for philosophical arguments or pure theory), is not supportable from true science. While debunking  abiogenesis does not necessarily imply the truth of special Creation, it does help to eliminate one of the foundations of the false construct of evolution which humanistic scientists hope to erect in opposition to Creation. As such, there is no reason for the rational person to accept evolutionist assertions about the "truth" of abiogenesis, nor to consider the various abiogenetic theories as a reason to disbelieve in the creation of life by God's hand.
http://www.studytoanswer.net/origins/abiogenesis.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw



Claim: 12.35 Everything came from a bottleneck, from a single form, from which everything descended. 
Reply: Common descent, the tree of life, a failed hypothesis

There are at least ten individual points, or evidence, that refute the claim of universal common ancestry. 

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2239-evolution-common-descent-the-tree-of-life-a-failed-hypothesis

E. Camprubí :The Emergence of Life 12 December 2019
The organization of various biological forms and their interrelationships, vis-à-vis biochemical and molecular networks, is characterized by the interlinked processes of flow of information between the information-bearing macromolecular semantides, namely DNA and RNA, and proteins (Zuckerkandl and Pauling 1965).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-019-0624-8

Clemens Richert: Prebiotic chemistry and human intervention 12 December 2018
For experiments aimed at demonstrating chemically complex processes, such as multistep syntheses mimicking biochemical pathways or genetic replication, repeated interventions by the experimentalist have been necessary. Each step needs a specific chemical environment or set of conditions to occur in high yield. For example, an elimination reaction needs other conditions than an addition reaction, and assuming that both will occur simultaneously in the same solution is unrealistic.
In the cell, the individual steps of a biosynthetic pathway are usually catalyzed by different enzymes. Each enzyme creates a specific microenvironment for a reaction in its active site. For potentially prebiotic, enzyme-free multistep syntheses, a chemical work-up at the end of a reaction is often required, involving steps such as precipitation, crystallization or other forms of handling and purification, and an often drastic change in chemical conditions from one synthetic transformation to the next.
Life is a non-equilibrium phenomenon. It requires an energy source that drives its reactions. Assuming that simple heating/cooling cycles could have driven the formation of functional biomacromolecules that were then able to harness the energy emitted by the sun via photosynthesis, seems unrealistic to me. Achieving the level of specificity required to successfully operate a protocell with genetic apparatus, metabolism, and cell division under strongly denaturing conditions is not easy, certainly when it comes to enzyme-free replication relying on the intrinsic specificity of small molecule interactions. So, the periodic addition of a chemical condensing agent may be unavoidable to drive biochemical reactions that are endergonic, even in “minimal intervention” experiments. Without the chemical activation, equilibrium (death) sets in. So, some level of human intervention may always be required for complex, multistep processes. After all, what the dominant activation agent was before enzymes began to use ATP will remain an enigma to many of us for the foreseeable future.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07219-5?fbclid=IwAR326klkI5xfGPxLjXbHTM_uJoM1toQkKUFcbiiNcbhJMk_-nMgLZLoXB6Q


”Definitely embarrassing:” Nobel Laureate retracts non-reproducible paper in Nature journal
Jack W. Szostak—a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for their pioneering research on aging—told us he was “incredibly excited” when he “thought we had at least a partial solution to this problem,” which researchers have been working on for over 50 years.  

But in subsequent experiments, Tivoli Olsen — a member of Szostak’s lab — could not reproduce the 2016 findings.

he beauty of Abiogenesis ("Chemical evolution"), in an Origins debate context, is both the simplicity of the facts and the magnitude of its black and white starkness. There's "0" middle ground. Biomacromolecules, hundreds of millions strong in the biosphere, cannot be shown to abiotically self synthesize in 1) Nature, 2) the laboratory (even with ridiculous [60+ years!!] high level human interventionism):  and 3) nor can they be shown, oceans strong, to have **ever** existed, deeply buried in geologic history. Three strikes, you're done!! Life did't create or self arise apart from outside "super" natural interventionism. Now, what was that about "appealing to ignorance" and incredulity? You mean blind, fairytale beliefism in foundationless evolutionism? That's about right.
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/05/definitely-embarrassing-nobel-laureate-retracts-non-reproducible-paper-nature-journal/?fbclid=IwAR1KdmyAK1yChhcTNEQhtIDcVdDbkC_EG4N0l4W4SQwsyRPJxlpCYbW9fic

Meredith Root-Bernstein: The ribosome as a missing link in the evolution of life 2015
The gap is enormous between the simplicity-toward- complexity models,which can suggest how simple replication of small sets of polymers may have emerged,and complexity-toward-simplicity models,which suggest a minimum of several hundred genes and their products networked within specialized metabolic compartments. What kind of evolvable entities might bridge this gap?
https://sci-hub.ren/10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.11.025

Kuhan Chandru: Simple prebiotic synthesis of high diversity dynamic combinatorial polyester libraries 31 May 2018
Simple prebiotic synthesis of high diversity dynamic combinatorial polyester libraries 31 May 2018
The generation and selection of molecules with activities including catalysis and replication from random complex mixtures remains a major challenge in origin of life research
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-018-0031-1

In 2012, Professor Chaitin published a book entitled, Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical (Pantheon, ISBN: 978-0-375-42314-7). Here are some short excerpts from what Professor Chaitin said about the software of life in his talk in May 2011:

In the opinion of this eminent Darwinist scientist, then, talk of a genetic code is quite literal: “it’s not just an analogy.”
Here’s basically the idea. We all know about computer programming languages, and they’re relatively recent, right? Fifty or sixty years, maybe, I don’t know. So … this is artificial digital software – artificial because it’s man-made: we came up with it. Now there is natural digital software, meanwhile, … by which I mean DNA, and this is much, much older – three or four billion years. And the interesting thing about this software is that it’s been there all along, in every cell, in every living being on this planet, except that we didn’t realize that … there was software there until we invented software on our own, and after that, we could see that we were surrounded by software…

A teleological explanation like this ties in perfectly well with intelligent agency: normally the question we ask an agent when they do something is: “Why did you do it that way?” The question of how the agent did it is of secondary importance, and it may be the case that if the agent is a very intelligent one, we might not even understand his/her “How” explanation. But we would still want to know “Why?” And in the case of the genetic code, we have an answer to that question.

We currently lack even a plausible natural process which could have generated the genetic code. On the other hand, we know that intelligent agents can generate codes. The default hypothesis should therefore be that the code we find in living things is the product of an Intelligent Agent.

A. G. CAIRNS-SMITH: Seven clues to the origin of life

A scientific detective story
I think, to say that on average the 14 hurdles that it would take to make primed nucleotides would each take 10 unit operations - that at least 140 little events would have to be appropriately sequenced. Unguided, the appropriate thing happened at each point on one occasion in six. The odds against a successful unguided synthesis of a batch of primed nucleotide on the primitive Earth would be a huge number, represented approximately by a 1 followed by 109 zeros ( 10^109). How did Nature start to play this game? At the very least a maintained supply of primed nucleotides would be required for any kind of organism using our kind of message tapes. A nucleotide making factory would be needed. 'The odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them.' There are many hypotheses (speculations) on abiogenesis...It is remarkable, it takes an enormous amount of "Intelligent explanatory attempts" to come with the myriad of speculative "explanations" of why there's no "Intelligent Design" involved... in life forms that clearly are (somehow) designed! Also, all of the abiogenesis hypotheses (speculations)... involve a "spark" of some kind that "crank the engine of life and self-replication." It takes an action (lighting, meteor, clay, etc.) to make it happen. BTW:  the "Spark theory"... is probably the most reasonable one. It's Intelligent Divine. Gunight!
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.
http://library.lol/main/CB7DF9653D1B1E6410B8AB66E268A8F6

Paul Davies 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

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.

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.

In spite of its compelling interest and importance, and despite enormous strides that have been made in relevant fields such as molecular genetics, remarkably little real progress has been made toward understanding how life actually arose since Oparin ( 1938 ) proposed the model of chemical evolution, later supported experimentally by Miller ( 1953 ). To some extent, this is because the classic concept of chemical evolution, with the ocean as an “organic soup,” has become viewed as implausible. This is especially true with the formation of complex monomers and polymers – notably nucleic acids (NA) and peptides – that require high monomer concentrations and conditions that favor condensation. 2

The origin of biological information that now resides in the base sequences of RNA and DNA and the amino acid sequence of proteins represent an issue that is perhaps more enigmatic than the formation of the macromolecules themselves.

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.

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.

A. Graham Cairns-Smith:  Chemistry and the Missing Era of Evolution
Our central biochemical control system with its DNA genes, protein enzymes, and so forth, is broadly universal too in its way of working. However, this system seems much too sophisticated too high-tech (its parts too elaborately interdependent) to be anything other than a product of natures engineer. If this is so, we should be thinking in terms of an earlier era of Darwinian evolution during which the essentials of our system were invented, and through which our current “molecules of life” acquired their significance.
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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.

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/

Objection: Cells are not irreducible complex.
Answer: Mainstream scientific papers confirm indirectly that cells are irreducibly complex. The paper: Determination of the Core of a Minimal Bacterial Gene Set says: Based on the conjoint analysis of several computational and experimental strategies designed to define the minimal set of protein-coding genes that are necessary to maintain a functional bacterial cell, we propose a minimal gene set composed of 206 genes. Such a gene set will be able to sustain the main vital functions of a hypothetical simplest bacterial cell.

What good is a one cylinder motor for without a piston?
What good is a piston for, if not used fully mounted in the cylinder with the right size to fit and interconnected, to fulfill its task? Ok. You could use it as an Ashtray. But for that, you would not need to produce it highly specified with piston rings, connecting rod etc.
What good is a production line of pistons for, if the end product, the piston, has no place to be employed?
What good is a transport system for, if there is no place to deliver the goods, and a communication system to direct them to the right place?

Now let's apply that to biology.

What good would DNA, mRNA, RNA polymerase, tRNA's, Ribosomes and chaperones be good for by their own, if not interconnected in a working cell? Why would a prebiotic soup produce these molecular machines? They would only become functional with the instructions encoded in DNA, defining and specifying how they would have to be interconnected The thing is, there's no driver for any of the pieces to emerge individually because single parts confer no advantage in and of themselves. The necessity for the parts of the system to be in place all at once is simply evidence of a planning organizing creative intelligence.  

Biological systems are functionally organized, integrated into an interdependent network, and complex, like human-made machines and factories. The wiring of an electrical device equals to metabolic pathways. A minimal metabolic network is required in every cell and must have emerged prior life began. For the assembly of a biological system of multiple parts, not only the origin of the genome information to produce all subunits and assembly cofactors must be explained, but also parts availability ( The right materials must be transported to the building site. Often these materials in their raw form are unusable. Other complex machines come into play to transform the raw materials into a usable form.  All this requires specific information. )  synchronization, ( these parts must be read on hand at the building site )  manufacturing and assembly coordination ( which required the information of how to assemble each single part correctly, at the right place, at the right moment, and in the right position ) , and interface compatibility ( the parts must fit together correctly, like lock and key ) . Unless the origin of all these steps is properly explained, functional complexity as existing in biological systems has not been addressed adequately.

The immense challenge to unguided, random mechanisms becomes, even more, evidence, once you remove the delusional crutches of evolution, and look into the origin of the first self-replicating cell. The solutions to overcome problems like DNA replication errors or damage must all be pre-programmed, and the repair "working horses" to resolve the problem must be ready in place and "know" what to do how, and when, and able to compare to what is right, and what is in error.  If a robot in a factory assembly line fails, employees are ready to detect the error and make the repair. In the cell, the malfunction of any part even as tiny and irrelevant as it might seem, can be fatal, and if the repair mechanisms are not functioning correctly and fully in place right from the start, the repair can't be done, and life ceases.  These repair enzymes which cleave, join, add, replace etc. must be programmed in order to function properly right from the start. Aberrantly processed pre-tRNAs, for example, are eliminated through a nuclear surveillance pathway by degradation of their 3′ ends, whereas mature tRNAs lacking modifications are degraded from their 5′ends in the cytosol.

Jack Szostak: Scientific American, 2009
It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago.
[url=https://www.commackschools.org/Downloads/Origin of Life article Scientific American.pdf]https://www.commackschools.org/Downloads/Origin%20of%20Life%20article%20Scientific%20American.pdf[/url]

George Whiteside: 
I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes in a sense the Darwinian set of chemical reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously I just don't understand how that works
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428793/three-questions-for-george-whitesides/

George M. Whitesides: Origins of life |  | TEDxBoston
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fJffUkViOQ
Imagine a chicken looking skeptically at a bowl of chicken soup and you know how we all know how to as it was disassembled a chicken into the pieces to make chicken soup you boil it and the molecules that make up the chicken make chicken soup think about the problem of going backward how would you go from chicken soup to chicken?  no idea?  but that's the problem of the origin of life because something like that must have happened

Robert Shapiro: A Replicator Was Not Involved in the Origin of Life 
a profound difficulty exists however with the idea of RNA or any other replicator at the start of life existing replicators can serve as templates for the sense of the synthesis of additional copies of themselves but this device cannot be used for the preparation of the very next such molecule which must arise spontaneously from an unorganized mixture the formation of an information-bearing homo polymer through undirected chemical synthesis appears to be very improbable
https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/713803621

Richard Dawkins
The universe could so easily have remain lifeless it is an astonishing stroke of luck that we were here that's a big concession isn't it coming from him I mean that's a really big concession a stroke of luck

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Sem_tz45

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible UdQoG55
Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible The_tr10

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Slide_10


Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Prokar10

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Origin11

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Origin10
https://sci-hub.st/https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/4/42

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Prebio10

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Prebio11

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Prebio10

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Prebio12



Last edited by Otangelo on Sat Jun 26, 2021 12:22 pm; edited 22 times in total

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Admin

Abiogenesis - By unguided chemical reactions? - No chance !!
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 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 the 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 the 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 !!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1306800/


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If you see blueprint with precise instructions how to build a factory, including all machines, production lines, energy generators, computers, etc.:  Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone very intelligent elaborated the blueprint upon knowledge, information, intuition, inventive power, experience, and reason?  Or would you consider that ink randomly was thrown on a piece of paper, and somehow, the ink formed letters, lines, graphics, instructions, tables, etc. ? Even the most basic biological cell maintaining the most basic functions of life requires far more complex information to make the simplest Cell than man-made machines. 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 in the universe? -  

The storyline has been repeated again and again throughout history, boldly proclaiming that we have failed to learn from the past: humans always approach a biological phenomenon by first assuming that it is far simpler than reality. Even as the layers of actual complexity are revealed, we repeatedly fool ourselves into thinking that the most recently understood layer will be the last. Perhaps our naive assumptions of simplicity come from our desire to achieve dominion over all of life. Ernst Haeckel believed that life began spontaneously through natural processes, and his belief likely amplified his incorrect assumptions about the simplicity of life. In The History of Creation, in 1883, he referred to Monera (the name of an obsolete taxonomic kingdom that has been replaced by the domains of Archaea and Bacteria—the domains that include Myco, Capri, Synthia, and E. coli) as

Organisms which are, in fact, not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless, simple, homogeneous matter. The entire body of one of these Monera, during life, is nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of an albuminous combination of carbon. Simpler or more imperfect organisms we cannot possibly conceive.

And: We have before this become acquainted with the simplest of all species of organisms in the monera, whose entire bodies when completely developed consist of nothing but a semifluid albuminous lump; they are organisms which are of the utmost importance for the theory of the first origin of life. But most other organisms, also, at a certain period of their existence—at least, in the first period of their life in the shape of egg-cells or germ-cells, are essentially nothing but simple little lumps of such albuminous formative matter, known as plasma, or protoplasma.

To account for the origin of life on our earth requires solving several problems:
How the organic molecules that define life, e.g. amino acids, nucleotides, were created;
How these were assembled into macromolecules, e.g. proteins and nucleic acids, — a process requiring catalysts;
How these were able to reproduce themselves;
How these were assembled into a system delimited from its surroundings (i.e., a cell).

Abiotic Synthesis of Organic Molecules
As for the first, three scenarios have been proposed: organic molecules were synthesized from inorganic compounds in the atmosphere — the "primeval soup" theory;
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AbioticSynthesis.html

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Observation: 
The origin of life depends on biological cells, which perpetuate life upon the complex action of  

- factory portals with fully automated security checkpoints and control ( membrane proteins )
- factory compartments ( organelles )
- a library index and fully automated information classification, storage and retrieval program ( chromosomes, and the gene regulatory network )
- molecular computers, hardware ( DNA ) 
- software, a language using signs and codes like the alphabet, an instructional blueprint, ( the genetic and over a dozen epigenetic codes )
- information retrieval ( RNA polymerase )
- transmission ( messenger RNA )
- translation ( Ribosome ) 
- signaling ( hormones ) 
- complex machines ( proteins )
- taxis ( dynein, kinesin, transport vesicles )
- molecular highways ( tubulins, used by dynein and kinesin proteins for molecular transport to various destinations )
- tagging programs ( each protein has a tag, which is an amino acid sequence ) informing other molecular transport machines where to transport them.
- factory assembly lines ( fatty acid synthase, non-ribosomal peptide synthase )
- error check and repair systems  ( exonucleolytic proofreading, strand-directed mismatch repair ) 
- recycling methods ( endocytic recycling )
- waste grinders and management  ( Proteasome Garbage Grinders )  
- power generating plants ( mitochondria )
- power turbines ( ATP synthase )
- electric circuits ( the metabolic network )

Biological cells are a veritable micro-miniaturized industrial park full of interlinked and interdependent factories containing millions of exquisitely designed
pieces of intricate molecular machinery. Biological  Cells do not resemble factory parks, they ARE an industrial park of various interconnected factories, working in conjunction.

Hypothesis (Prediction)
Complex machines and interconnected factory parks are intelligently designed. Biological cells are intelligently designed. Factories can not self-assemble spontaneously
by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction. The claim can be falsified, once someone can demonstrate that factories
can self-assemble spontaneously by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction.

Experiment: 
Since origin of life experiments began, nobody was able to bring up an experiment, replicating the origin of life by natural means. 

Eugene Koonin, advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics, writes in his book: 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. " 

Scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process absent the intervention of a
conscious creative agency. 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.

Conclusion: 
Upon the logic of mutual exclusion,  design and non-design are mutually exclusive (it was one or the other) so we can use eliminative logic: if non-design is highly
improbable, then design is highly probable. The evaluative status of non-design (and thus design) can be decreased or increased by observable empirical evidence, so
a theory of design is empirically responsive and is testable, so, by applying  Bayesian probability, we can conclude that Life is most probably intelligently designed.

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Long periods of time do not make life inevitable. Molecules rather disintegrate based on the second law of thermodynamics. and randomization turns more complete.

Since prebiotic processes are natural randomizers and abiogenesis requires specific products, it does not appear that prebiotic processes have inherent capability to meet the requirements necessitated for successful abiogenesis. This plausibly characterizes every hypothetical step of abiogenesis and explains why none have succeeded.  Claude Shannon showed that randomization is the fundamental behavior and entropy is simply a mathematical expression of certain of its aspects

If you can't make a brick, you can't make a house. Naturalistic beliefism is an anecdotal pseudo-scientific House of Cards.
If you can't make left-handed amino acids, you cannot make life essential proteins, nor protein complexes, nor biological cells.

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There’s a huge chasm between the origins of life and the last common ancestor
Scientists are learning that what is required for life seems to be much greater than what is possible by natural process.  This huge difference has motivated scientists to creatively construct new theories for reducing requirements and enhancing possibilities, but none of these ideas has progressed from speculation to plausibility. The simplest "living system" we can imagine, involving hundreds of components interacting in an organized way to achieve energy production and self-replication, would be extremely difficult to assemble by undirected natural process.  And all of this self-organization would have to occur before natural selection (which depends on self-replication) was available. 
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-structure-arose-in-the-primordial-soup/

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.

Darwin was unaware that life emerged very early during the life of the planet, probably within the first 0.5–1 billion years. Life began, in the words of Philip Ball, “in a blink, almost the instant the oceans were formed. It is as if it was just waiting to happen — as indeed some have suggested. Although Darwinian evolution needed billions of years to find a route from microbe to man, it seems that going from mineral to microbe took barely a moment”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4215203/

I'd say, something does not match here, no ??!!

Daniel J. Nicholson: On being the right size, revisited
Even for a single protein to be successfully expressed in the cell, a huge number of molecules need to interact with one another in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right order. And it should not be surprising that the likelihood that all of this happens in a perfectly efficient and precisely timed fashion (as one would expect of the programmatic execution of an algorithmic sequence of coded instructions) is virtually zero once we take into account the random and ferocious buffeting that all molecules are subject to inside the cell by virtue of their size.
https://philpapers.org/archive/NICOBT-2.pdf

Michael Denton writes in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis: 1985:
“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 kilometres 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 portholes 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 thousand 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....

As Coppedge (1973) notes,
even 1) postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary for life, 2) speeding up the bonding rate so as to form different chemical combinations a trillion times more rapidly than hypothesized to have occurred, 3) allowing for a 4.6 billion- year-old earth and 4) using all atoms on the earth still leaves the probability of a single protein molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10^261.

Using the lowest estimate made before the discoveries of the past two decades raised the number several fold. Coppedge estimates the probability of 1 in 10119,879 is necessary to obtain the minimum set of the required estimate of 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life form.


http://www.c4id.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=211:the-problem-of-the-origin-of-life&catid=50:genetics&Itemid=43

The individual macromolecules are complex
the complex interaction of biological macromolecules is only one aspect of the problem facing the origin of life. What compounds the enigma is that the individual macromolecular components are themselves complex, in the sense that their sequences - of ribonucleotides in the case of RNA, or amino acids for proteins - are very specific.

The linear amino acid sequence of a protein is specific because it must (a) be able to fold into a discrete 3-dimensional structure, and (b) have the right amino acids in the right positions in the linear sequence so that, when folded, they are in exactly the right positions in relation to each other to form the active site(s) of the protein. (And similar considerations apply to RNAs.)

Sequences which meet these criteria are exceedingly rare compared with the astronomical number of possible sequences of a suitable length. For example Douglas Axe has estimated that only 1 in about 1074 possible sequences will have biological function (Axe). So it is totally unrealistic to think that such sequences could have arisen by chance. How much less a suite of mutually dependent macromolecules?
If the components themselves were not so improbable then it might be realistic to think that a complex combination of components could arise by chance; but the extreme improbability of the individual components is such that they are very unlikely to arise individually, and hence there is no chance whatever of an interdependent system.

Where even just two macromolecules are required to perform a function, then it would be necessary for both components to arise together: Because natural selection does not have foresight: if one component arises alone it will not be retained for potential future usefulness (when the second component is available), but will almost certainly degrade by mutation. And, it should be noted, if the probability of getting one component is 1 in 1074 then the probability of getting two together is 1 in 10148 (not 1 in 2x1074); and so on for multi-component systems. This is why the obligatory mutual dependence of many macromolecules in even basic biological systems completely defies any hope of an evolutionary origin.

So, in summary, the crux of the problem is that even a basic biological replicating system requires (a) several macromolecules with complementary functions with (b) each having a highly improbable sequence. And this combination of complexities presents an insurmountable challenge to a naturalistic origin of life.

Scientific articles about cell design now run into the millions, and, to many observers, this research has made the naturalistic explanation of the origin of living cells increasingly
improbable. A non parasite, non viral, life form requires many billions of parts, all of which must be properly assembled together to all the life form to live. If any central component    of any one of the many systems required for humans, such as the circulatory system, is absent or dysfunctional, the result is usually death this “is one of the basic tenets of modern medicine” (Glicksman, 2006, pp. 12 )

Origin of Life: Constructing the Proteins and Nucleic Acids
Any plausible theory of the origin of life must include the formation of complicated macro-molecules like proteins, DNA and RNA. In addition, there are other necessary components of life such as lipids, carbohydrates, hormones, enzymes, etc. that must be formed and be utilized to produce life.
The syntheses of proteins from DNA is very complicated (see any biology textbook), and experiments to produce life in a test tube fall woefully short of creating life. There are a series of obstacles to the notion of life arising spontaneously from a sea of chemicals:
CHEMICAL ENVIRONMENT - Some of the necessary component chemicals react with one another is counter-productive ways. For example, phosphoric acid which would be necessary to form DNA would form an insoluble salt with calcium (calcium phosphate), sink to the bottom of a primordial sea, and be unavailable to make DNA. (Gish 1972, 23).
POLYMERIZATION - How are the polymers formed in proteins and nucleic acids? A basic problem is that monomers never become polymers unless energy is supplied - they don't spontaneously arise. Protein formation in the laboratory requires a number of deliberate steps by a chemist. Experiments with catalysts and heating of dry amino acids have not demonstrated anything close to realistic life macro-molecules. (Gish 1972, 17-23)
SEQUENCES - This detail is at the center of the origin of life problem. Assuming that there WAS a large supply of molecular building blocks, how do you get the specific sequences necessary in proteins and in DNA? Consider proteins: the sequence of amino acids determines the way the molecule will "fold up", which gives it physical properties. For a particular function, an exact sequence is required. What are the odds of this occurring by accident? The odds of forming a specific molecule with 100 amino acids is (1/20) ** 100 = 10e130 (the number 10 with 130 zeros following it) to 1. Forget it!
Along these lines, the famous astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe (both atheists) calculated the probability of life forming by chance in five billion years on earth. The answer is 10e40000 to 1 (a number so close to zero as to effectively be zero). They then considered the universe with 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars and 20 billion years. Still no chance. Hoyle said the probability of life evolving anywhere in the universe is as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747!
OPTICAL ISOMERS - Amino acids are found in L-amino (left) or D-amino (right) types and are formed in equal proportions in synthesis experiments. Animals and people are made of almost exclusively L-animo types. How is this selection made? ... Still an open question.
Now we cross the line from the molecular to the living. Whether bacteria, animals, plants or people, we all have cells.
Cells consist of many biological elements that are enclosed in a cell membrane that allows certain molecules to pass out of it and let others in. It must be able to perform many functions: self-replicate, maintain itself by the construction of new proteins, regulate it's functions, etc.
Cells are tremendously complex and more complicated than any machine man has ever built. Even the smallest bacterial cell has 100 proteins, DNA, RNA, and contains one hundred billion atoms.
The simplest cells are not more primitive than, or ancestral of, larger ones. This poses an immediate problem. How do you get all the complicated machinery to work at the same time? It either all works or nothing works. For example, the information to construct the apparatus to synthesize proteins is stored in the DNA. But the extraction of this information requires the apparatus to be in place already (Denton 1985, 269).
To explain the evolution of the cell requires imagining simpler "proto-cells". One such idea by Francis Crick (Denton 1985, 265) uses a proto-cell that is allowed to make mistakes in protein formation (termed "statistical proteins") to create new systems. This is challenged by the knowledge that even small errors cause devastating biological consequences.
In short, explaining the origin of life is a big problem for evolutionists. It is such a problem that mainstream scientific literature even considers the possibility of life dropping in from outer space, called the theory of "panspermia" (Scientific American, Feb 1992). But even this only moves to problem one step outward.[/b]
http://www.bestbiblescience.org/ol3.htm

Fred Hoyle
To press the matter further, if there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non- biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon... In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on Earth. ~ 

Dr. Kurt Wise: My answer to that would be that the evolutionary theory of biogenesis*, the origin of life, can be potentially substantiated from three areas: evidence; secondly, from experi­ment; thirdly, from theory. In other words, can they show that it happened by evidence? Can they show that it happened by experiment? Can they show that it happened by theory? It’s in those three areas that they have failed, every one of them. There is no evidence. There are no rocks that exist from that period of time. Secondly, there is no successful experiment which has even gone through two steps in a row along that necessary path. The experiments to produce life have not been successful. Thirdly, theoretically, there seem to be some significant barriers to even imagining how life could come about. We have the Second Law of Thermodynamics which seems to represent an insurmountable barrier. The evolutionary theory of abiogenesis has failed on all three counts to explain the origin of life.

This is a frequently raised, but unsophisticated argument for Darwinian evolution and the origin of life. You can't just vaguely appeal to vast and unending amounts of time (and other probabilistic resources) and assume that Darwinian evolution or whatever mechanisms you propose for the origin of life,  can produce anything "no matter how complex." Rather, you have to demonstrate that sufficient probabilistic resources or evolutionary mechanisms indeed exist to produce the feature.
http://www.jashow.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Creation_Debate-Part_6

What is education" when it produces individuals who swear that evolution is true or that those who oppose it don't understand the process.
The so called evolutionary argument is more a matter of assaulting the intelligence of those who oppose it with a range assertions that proponents of evolution really have no answer, how these mechanisms really work. To argue that forever is long enough for the complexity of life to reveal itself is an untenable argument. The numbers are off any scale we can relate to as possible to explain what we see of life. Notwithstanding, you have beings in here who go as far to say it's all accounted for already, as if they know something nobody else does.

http://www.arn.org/docs/booher/scientific-case-for-ID.html
The probability of useful DNA, RNA, or proteins occurring by chance is extremely small. Calculations vary somewhat but all are extremely small (highly improbable). If one is to assume a hypothetical prebiotic soup to start there are at least three combinational hurdles (requirements) to overcome. Each of these requirements decreases the chance of forming a workable protein. First, all amino acids must form a chemical bond (peptide bond) when joining with other amino acids in the protein chain. Assuming, for example a short protein molecule of 150 amino acids, the probability of building a 150 amino acids chain in which all linkages are peptide linkages would be roughly 1 chance in 10^45. The second requirement is that functioning proteins tolerate only left-handed amino acids, yet in abiotic amino acid production the right-handed and left-handed isomers are produced in nearly the same frequency. The probability of building a 150-amino-acid chain at random in which all bonds are peptide bonds and all amino acids are L-form is roughly 1 chance in 10^90. The third requirement for functioning proteins is that the amino acids must link up like letters in a meaningful sentence, i.e. in a functionally specified sequential arrangement. The chance for this happening at random for a 150 amino acid chain is approximately 1 chance in 10^195. It would appear impossible for chance to build even one functional protein considering how small the likelihood is. By way of comparison to get a feeling of just how low this probability is consider that there are only 10^65 atoms in our galaxy..
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/abiogenesis.html

Biologists currently estimate that the smallest life form as we know it would have needed about 256 genes. (See Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Volume 93, Number 19, pp. 10268-10273 at http://journals.at-home.com/get_doc/1854083/8551).
A gene is typically 1000 or more base pairs long, and there is some space in between, so 256 genes would amount to about 300,000 bases of DNA. The deoxyribose in the DNA ``backbone'' determines the direction in which it will spiral. Since organic molecules can be generated in both forms, the chance of obtaining all one form or another in 300,000 bases is one in two to the 300,000 power. This is about one in 10 to the 90,000 power. It seems to be necessary for life that all of these bases spiral in the same direction. Now, if we imagine many, many DNA molecules being formed in the early history of the earth, we might have say 10 100 molecules altogether (which is really much too high). But even this would make the probability of getting one DNA molecule right about one in 10 to the 89,900 power, still essentially zero. And we are not even considering what proteins the DNA generates, or how the rest of the cell structure would get put together! So the real probability would be fantastically small.

Biologists are hypothesizing some RNA-based life form that might have had a smaller genome and might have given rise to a cell with about 256 genes. Until this is demonstrated, one would have to say that the problem of abiogenesis is very severe indeed for the theory of evolution.

Hoyle F "The Intelligent Universe," Michael Joseph: London, 1983, pp.18
"The popular idea that life could have arisen spontaneously on Earth dates back to experiments that caught the public imagination earlier this century. If you stir up simple nonorganic molecules like water, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen cyanide with almost any form of intense energy, ultraviolet light for instance, some of the molecules reassemble themselves into amino acids, a result demonstrated about thirty years ago by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. The amino acids, the individual building blocks of proteins can therefore be produced by natural means. But this is far from proving that life could have evolved in this way. No one has shown that the correct arrangements of amino acids, like the orderings in enzymes, can be produced by this method. No evidence for this huge jump in complexity has ever been found, nor in my opinion will it be. Nevertheless, many scientists have made this leap-from the formation of individual amino acids to the random formation of whole chains of amino acids like enzymes-in spite of the obviously huge odds against such an event having ever taken place on the Earth, and this quite unjustified conclusion has stuck. In a popular lecture I once unflatteringly described the thinking of these scientists as a "junkyard mentality". As this reference became widely and not quite accurately quoted I will repeat it here. A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe."

http://www.reasons.org/articles/evolution-as-mythology-part-3-of-5-the-myth-of-abiogenesis

Origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel points out:
"The self-organization of the reductive citric acid cycle without the help of 'informational' catalysts would be a near miracle...It is hard to see how any..[of the potentially self-replicating] polymers that have been described up to now...could have accumulated on the early earth...[It is] to appeal to magic."5

Could the genetic code have been spontaneously generated? Biologists J. T. Trevors and D. L. Abel conclude:
"The argument has been repeatedly made that given sufficient time, a genetic instruction set and language system could have arisen. But extended time does not provide an explanatory mechanism for spontaneously generated genetic instruction. No amount of time proposed thus far, can explain this type of conceptual communication system. It is not just complex. It is conceptually complex."

biologist Francis Crick acknowledged in 1981:
 "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going."

Abiogenesis is not only unproven, it is mathematically impossible. No wonder both Orgel and Crick called it a miracle.


Nobel prize-winner, the late Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and an avowed atheist
materialist, admitted that
"the origin life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the  conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going" (Crick, 1981, p.88. My emphasis)

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/tj/v18/n2/abiogenesis

We now also realize, after a century of research, that the eukaryote protozoa, believed in Darwin’s day to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin, are actually enormously complex. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. … In terms of their basic biochemical design … no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.
This finding poses major difficulties for abiogenesis because life at the cellular level generally does not reveal a gradual increase in complexity as it allegedly ascends the evolutionary ladder from protozoa to humans. The reason why the molecular machinery and biochemistry of modern organisms is basically similar is that the basic biochemical requirements and constraints are the same for all life.56

Paul Davies reinforced the point that obtaining the building blocks would not explain their arrangement:
‘… just as bricks alone don’t make a house, so it takes more than a random collection of amino acids to make life. Like house bricks, the building blocks of life have to be assembled in a very specific and exceedingly elaborate way before they have the desired function.’63

An analogy is written language. Natural objects in forms resembling the English alphabet (circles, straight lines, etc.) abound in nature, but this fact does not help to understand the origin of information (such as that in Shakespeare’s plays). The reason is that this task requires intelligence both to create the information (the play) and then to design and build the machinery required to translate that information into symbols (the written text). What must be explained is the source of the information in the text (the words and ideas), not the existence of circles and straight lines. Likewise, it is not enough to explain the origin of the amino acids, which correspond to the letters. Rather, even if they were produced readily, the source of the information that directs the assembly of the amino acids contained in the genome must be explained.

Another huge problem is that information is useless unless it can be read. But the decoding machinery is itself encoded on the DNA. The leading philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1902–1994), expressed the huge problem:
‘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.

Abiogenic Origin of Life: A Theory in Crisis
http://origins.swau.edu/papers/life/chadwick/default.html
The synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids from small molecule precursors represents one of the most difficult challenges to the model of prebiological evolution. There are many different problems confronted by any proposal. Polymerization is a reaction in which water is a product. Thus it will only be favored in the absence of water. The presence of precursors in an ocean of water favors depolymerization of any molecules that might be formed. Careful experiments done in an aqueous solution with very high concentrations of amino acids demonstrate the impossibility of significant polymerization in this environment. A thermodynamic analysis of a mixture of protein and amino acids in an ocean containing a 1 molar solution of each amino acid (100,000,000 times higher concentration than we inferred to be present in the prebiological ocean) indicates the concentration of a protein containing just 100 peptide bonds (101 amino acids) at equilibrium would be 10-338 molar. Just to make this number meaningful, our universe may have a volume somewhere in the neighborhood of 1085 liters. At 10-338 molar, we would need an ocean with a volume equal to 10229 universes (100, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) just to find a single molecule of any protein with 100 peptide bonds. So we must look elsewhere for a mechanism to produce polymers. It will not happen in the ocean.

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/23/12503.full.pdf
I have empha-sized the implausibility of the suggestion that complicated cycles could self-organize, and the importance of learning more about the potential of surfaces to help organize simpler cycles.

http://www.benotconformed.org/odds-of-abiogenesis.htm

Calculating the Probability of Biopoesis
Although permitting large preassembled parts like that would be entirely unrealistic, for the sake of argument, let's grant naturalists another very generous assumption. Let's suppose that somehow, without pre-existing life to get them from, all of the smaller components needed for our simplest self-replicating molecular machine to form are readily available, just as they are inside a cell.
Furthermore, let’s imagine that our simplest possible self replicator is even simpler than it has to be, as simple as replicators which depend upon life to reproduce, just as in Golay’s example above.
For a machine like that to form for the first time in such an environment, the equivalent of 1500 correct chemical events must occur, each with a probability of ½. This is the same as the odds of flipping a coin 1500 times, and getting heads each time.
Given this liberal assumption, the odds of any sequence of chemical events producing the simplest self-replicating biological machine would be ½ 1500, or 1/10450.
What is the likelihood of this having happened somewhere in the universe? The latest estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe is 70 sextillion stars. CNN reported that Dr. Simon Driver, when asked "if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere," replied: ‘Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable." 4
That is such a large number of stars (70 followed by 21 zeroes, which we can write in shorthand as 70 x 1021) that Driver's conclusion sounds quite convincing, doesn't it? But let’s do the math to see if he is right.
Since Dr. Driver noted that light from the visible universe has not reached us yet, and that the universe could actually be much larger, let’s increase this estimate of stars in the universe to an amount greater than one million times what can currently be observed, to 10,000,000,000 sextillion stars, or 1031 stars.
Of course, as we mentioned above, Golay’s machine must have all of the parts it needs to make a copy of itself right beside it, without pre-existing life to provide those parts. Again we ask, how often does that happen in nature? Let’s assume it happens vastly more often than it actually does, and suppose that each of these stars has ten earth-sized planets orbiting it that are composed of nothing but the parts needed for the first replicator to form, so that all of the parts for biopoesis will be on hand, near each molecule, to be consistent with Golay’s analogy above. We will round the total number of atoms contained in these ten planets up to 1051, which is a little more than ten times the approximately 8.87•1049 atoms on earth.
Now let’s suppose that each of the atoms on these planets takes part in 1022 chemical events per second. Multiply that by 1021 seconds of cosmic history (an amount higher than 1000 times the current maximum estimated age of the universe, which is 6.3•1017 seconds), and you get 1031•105 •1022•1021 = 10125 possible chemical events that could have been tried out on these planets since the universe began.
Given these extremely generous assumptions, the odds of a simple self-replicating molecular system arising would therefore be 10125 /10450 = 1/10325. 4
In other words, if there is no God who created life, the odds of the simplest hypothetical precursor to life arising in our universe are less than 1 chance in

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000!

But wait! Isn’t a mirror image of our hypothetical replicator possible? That brings the odds up to 2/10325, still an extremely small number. Are other, more complex replicators possible besides the simplest possible one? Yes. But of course they are all even less likely to form.
Note that we have skewed all of the factors ridiculously in favor of the biopoesis of the simplest conceivable self-replicator, and it still turned out to be extremely unlikely. Had we calculated using more realistic figures, the odds would have been much, much lower. Our example demonstrates that of all conceivable chemical combinations, self-replicating ones are an extremely tiny portion of them.
And of course, the odds of the simplest form of free-living life (Pelagibacter ubique) known to man forming are significantly lower than even that! Furthermore, the recent discovery of the ENCODE project that most "junk DNA" in humans is biochemically active 6 makes it seem less likely that a free-living organism much simpler than Pelagibacter ubique could exist. If most of Pelagibacter ubique's DNA is also biochemically active (and this seems likely), then biopoesis is even less likely to be a realistic hypothesis. This, of course, drives the likelihood of biopoesis even closer to impossibility than it already is. And it is already extremely close to it.



Last edited by Otangelo on Sat Jun 26, 2021 5:40 am; edited 6 times in total

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Evolution Hopes You Don't Know Chemistry: The Problem of Control
According to modern evolutionary theory, the recipe for life is a chance accumulation of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen; add a pinch of phosphorus and sulfur, simmer for millions of years, and repeat if necessary. As a Ph.D. organic chemist, I am trained to understand the principles of chemistry, but this is not how chemicals react. Chemicals reacting with chemicals is a chemical reaction, and chemical reactions do not produce life. Life must create life. In the chemical literature, there is not a single example of life resulting from a chemical reaction. If life from chemicals were possible, it would be called spontaneous generation, an idea that scientists once thought happened in nature. Centuries ago, scientists used to believe that bread crumbs turned into mice because if you left bread crumbs on a table and returned later, the crumbs were gone and only mice were present. When true science got involved, they learned the truth that bread crumbs only attracted the mice that ate the crumbs. These scientists were quick to propose a theory that sounded reasonable until, that is, they studied the process and learned otherwise.

Proteins and DNA are complicated chemical molecules that are present within our body. Cells which make up the living body contain DNA, the blueprint for all life, and proteins regulating biochemical processes, leading scientists to conclude these components are the cause of life. While it is true that all living bodies have proteins and DNA, so do dead bodies. These chemicals are necessary for life to exist, but they do not "create" life by their presence; they only "maintain" the life that is already present. However, this is not the only problem with the "life from chemicals" theory.

Why do evolutionists vehemently proclaim the "life from chemicals" theory? Because if proteins and DNA only maintain life without creating it, then something else must have accomplished its origins. Evidence such as this points to an Omnipotent Creator, but they are not willing to make that concession.

Scientists can only look at life as it exists today, and try to determine how life originated in the past. They look at the end result and try to determine the process by which it was formed. Imagine looking at a photograph and trying to determine the brand of camera that was used to take the picture. Could you do it? Evolutionists have the same problem when they claim that life comes from chemicals. They look at the end result and propose a theory without ever observing the process. Scientists cannot study the past. Scientists can only look at the present and make theories about what happened in the past that would make the present the way it is today. When evolutionary scientists study the origins of life, they propose that all life resulted from chemical reactions by natural processes, overlooking the fact that chemical processes do not "naturally" behave in this manner. If you accepted chemical reactions as they occur, you would not believe that life came solely from chemicals. Is it legitimate to propose that evolution started in some primordial soup, when the long chain polymers that are present in proteins and DNA are so complicated that the level of chemical control needed during the chain building process is beyond the realm of natural chemistry?

Let's take a closer look at proteins and DNA, and the problems of their synthesis by evolutionary processes. Proteins are long polymers of amino acids linked in a chain. There are thousands of proteins within the human body, and they all differ by the sequence of the amino acids on the polymer chain. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid,) is a polymer of nucleotides. Nucleotides themselves are complicated chemical molecules consisting of a deoxyribose molecule and a phosphate chemically bonded to one of the following heterocycles: guanine, cytosine, thymine, and adenine. Although there are only four different heterocycles, the DNA chain contains billions of nucleotides connected together in a long precisely ordered chain. The sequence of the human DNA chain is so complicated, that even with the sophisticated scientific equipment available today, we still do not know the complete sequence. Proteins and DNA contain a unique order of the individual components. The order of the individual components is not a repeating pattern such as ABABAB or AABBAABB, but it is not a random order either. The order in these natural polymers is very precise, and it is this highly ordered sequence that allows these polymers to perform their intended purpose in the human body. If the sequence is changed even slightly, the altered polymer is no longer capable of performing the same function as the natural protein or DNA. If these polymers were formed by evolution in some primordial soup, then we should be able to explain how natural chemical processes were responsible for forming the sequence of amino acids. Evolutionists would say that amino acids eventually combined to form proteins and the nucleotide molecules combined to form DNA, and from them, life. To someone not trained in chemistry, this might sound like a reasonable process, but this is not how chemical reactions work.

Chemists are trained to understand the mechanisms of how molecules react and how to activate molecules so they will react predictably and in a controlled fashion. If a chemist wanted to synthesize the polymer chain of proteins or DNA in the laboratory, the starting compounds must be first activated so that they will begin to react. The chemist must then control the reactivity and the selectivity of the reactants so that the desired product is formed.

The problem with life arising from chemicals is a three-fold problem: chemical stability, chemical reactivity, and chemical selectivity during the chain building process. But evolutionists propose that these complex polymer chains built themselves in a precise, unlikely pattern, without an intelligent chemist controlling the reactions.

Chemical Stability
Chemical stability is a question of whether the components can even react at all.
By definition, all components in a hypothetical primordial soup would be stable, because if they were not, they would have already reacted. Amino acids are relatively stable in water and do not react to form proteins in water, and nucleotides do not react to form DNA. In order to make amino acids and nucleotides react to form a polymer, they must be chemically activated to react with other chemicals. But this chemical activation must be done in the absence of water because the activated compounds will react with water and break down. How could proteins and DNA be formed in a hypothetical primordial watery soup if the activated compounds required to form them cannot exist in water? This is the problem of Chemical Stability.

Chemical Reactivity

Chemical reactivity deals with how fast the components react in a given reaction. If life began in a primordial soup by natural chemical reactions, then the laws of chemistry should be able to predict the sequence of these chains. But when amino acids react chemically, they react according to their reactivity, and not in some specified order necessary for life. As the protein or DNA chain is increasing in size through chemical reaction, we should see the most reactive amino acid adding to the chain first, followed by the next most reactive amino acid, and so on.

Let's assume that we begin with the sequence R-T-X, and will add two amino acids "B" and "A" to it. If amino acid "B" is the most reactive amino acid, the sequence would be R-T-X-B-A. However, if "A" is the most reactive amino acid, then the sequence would be R-T-X-A-B. In a random chemical reaction, the sequence of amino acids would be determined by the relative reactivity of the different amino acids. The polymer chain found in natural proteins and DNA has a very precise sequence that does not correlate with the individual components' reaction rates. Since all of the amino acids have relatively similar structures, they all have similar reaction rates; they will all react at about the same rate making the precise sequence by random chemical reactions unthinkably unlikely. This is the problem of Chemical Reactivity.

Chemical Selectivity
Chemical selectivity is a problem of where the components react. Since the chain has two ends, the amino acids can add to either end of the chain. Even if by some magical process, a single amino acid "B" would react first as desired for the pre-determined life supporting sequence followed by a single amino acid "A," the product would be a mixture of at least four isomers because there are two ends to the chain. If there is an equal chance of amino acid "B" reacting in two different locations, then half will react at one end, half at the other end. The result of adding "B" will form two different products. When the addition of amino acid "A" occurs, it will react at both ends of the chain of both the products already present. As in the previous example, the major products would be R-T-X-B-A and A-R-T-X-B as well as A-B-R-T-X and B-R-T-X-A and others. The result is a mixture of several isomers of which the desired sequence seldom results, and this is the problem with only two amino acids reacting. As the third amino acid is added, it can react at both ends of four products, and so on, insuring randomness, not a precise sequence.

Since proteins may contain hundreds or thousands of amino acids in a sequence, imagine the huge number of undesired isomers that would be present if these large proteins were formed in a random process. Evolutionists might argue that all proteins were formed in this manner, and nature simply selected the ones that worked. However, this is only an ad hoc assumption and it ignores the fact that we do not have billions of "extra" proteins in our body. Furthermore, nature is not intelligent. There is nothing in nature to do the selecting all-the-while splicing together non-functioning (therefore non-selectable) amino acids toward a working whole. Evolutionists say that nature is blind, has no goal, and no purpose, and yet precise selection at each step is necessary. This is the problem of Chemical Selectivity.

The chemical control needed for the formation of a specific sequence in a polymer chain is just not possible in a random process. The synthesis of proteins and DNA in the laboratory requires the chemist to control the reaction conditions, to thoroughly understand the reactivity and selectivity of each component, and to carefully control the order of addition of the components as the chain is building in size. The successful formation of proteins and DNA in some primordial soup would require the same control of the reactivity and selectivity, and that would require the existence of a chemical controller. But chemicals cannot think, plan, or organize themselves to do anything. How can chemicals know what it is they're making? How can a chemical reaction make a protein or DNA, put it in an eye, heart, or brain, and do it without a controlling mechanism that knows what the end product is supposed to look like? This sounds much more like the work of an Omniscient Creator. Evolutionists have always been quick to claim that life came from chemicals, but their theory does not hold up to scientific scrutiny. Evolution claims that random chance natural processes formed life as we know it, but they fail to mention that their theory is anything but random or natural! This is the false logic of evolution. Evolutionists just hope you don't know chemistry!
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Eugene V. Koonin, page 351:
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 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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Denton, M: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler and Adler, Bethesda, p. 250, 1986. Back
We now also realize, after a century of research, that the eukaryote protozoa, believed in Darwin’s day to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin, are actually enormously complex. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer. Furthermore, molecular biology has demonstrated that the basic design of the cell is

   ‘… essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. … In terms of their basic biochemical design … no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.’

Wells: 2004, p.39.
"`In other words,' I said, `if you want to create life, on top of the challenge of somehow generating the cellular components out of non-living chemicals, you would have an even bigger problem in trying to it the ingredients together in the right way.' `Exactly! ... So even if you could accomplish the thousands of steps between the amino acids in the Miller tar-which probably didn't exist in the real world anyway-and the components you need for a living cell-all the enzymes, the DNA, and so forth-you're still immeasurably far from life. ... the problem of assembling the right parts in the right way at the right time and at the right place, while keeping out the wrong material, is simply insurmountable.'"

Shapiro: 1986, p.186.
"Many steps would be required which need different conditions, and therefore different geological locations" and "The total sequence would challenge our credibility, regardless of the time allotted for the process."


Robert Pirsig: 
"Why ... should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon,  hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of  chemistry? ... If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds ... It isn't the sun's energy. .... It has to be something else. What is  it?"

Lang L.H.
All biological reactions within human cells depend on enzymes. Their power as catalysts enables biological reactions to occur usually in milliseconds. But how slowly would these reactions proceed spontaneously, in the absence of enzymes - minutes, hours, days? ... Dr. Richard Wolfenden .... In 1998, he reported a biological transformation deemed `absolutely essential' in creating the building blocks of DNA  and RNA would take 78 million years in water. `Now we've found one that's 10,000 times slower than that,'  Wolfenden said. `Its half-time - the time it takes for half the substance to be consumed - is 1 trillion years,  100 times longer than the lifetime of the universe. Enzymes can make this reaction happen in 10 milliseconds.'
 "Without enzyme catalyst, slowest known biological reaction takes 1 trillion years," EurekAlert!, 5 May, 2003.

Johnson P.E.
As to the uncatalyzed phosphate monoester reaction of 1 trillion years, `This number puts us way beyond the known universe in terms of slowness,' he said. `(The enzyme reaction) is 21 orders of magnitude faster than the uncatalyzed case. And the largest we knew about previously was 18. We've approached scales than nobody can grasp.'  ... `Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans,' he said. `It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction.' ... `The enzymes we studied in this report are fascinating because they exceed all other known enzymes in their power as catalysts. We've only begun to understand  how to speed up reactions with chemical catalysts, and no one has even come within shouting distance of  producing their catalytic power.'"
*, "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and  Education," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL., 1995, pp.92-93

"Similarly, the discipline of biology will not only survive but prosper if it turns out that genetic information really is the product of preexisting intelligence. Biologists will have to give up their dogmatic materialism and discard unproductive hypotheses like the prebiotic soup, but to abandon bad ideas is a gain, not a loss.  Freed of the metaphysical chains that tie it to nineteenth-century materialism, biology can turn to the fascinating task of discovering how the intelligence embodied in the genetic information works through matter to make the organism function. In that case chemical evolution will go the way of alchemy- abandoned because a better understanding of the problem revealed its futility-and science will have reached  a new plateau."



“The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell.”

A specific example described in the book is the interdependence of DNA, RNA and protein. We summarize the issue, “DNA, RNA and proteins cannot do their jobs without the help of at least one of the other two. DNA is a library of detailed information for the various structures within the cell. It has the information for the manufacture of each protein. RNA is a copy of instructions from the DNA and is sent as a messenger to the ribosomes for making proteins. There are two types of proteins; functional proteins such as enzymes, and structural proteins, which compose the organelles. Living cells need all three molecules at the same time. The chance, simultaneous natural appearance of the three distinct, interdependent complex systems is just not possible.” Not only are these three needed for life, but an organism also needs a cell membrane, usable energy, reproduction and all left-handed amino acids. The cell itself is a tremendous and irrefutable example of irreducible complexity.

Considering the cell as being the ultimate irreducibly complex system, there is no conceivable way that life could arise by natural causes. Darwin’s theory of numerous, successive, slight modifications simply does not work when discussing the origin of life. The problem that irreducibly complexity brings to evolution is clearly daunting for evolutionists. Their way to deal with the problem is to dismiss it as nonscientific, pseudoscience or religion dressed in a tuxedo. However, when one looks at the issue of origin of life through the lens of irreducibly complexity, it simply brings one with a reasonable mind to his or her knees, admitting life cannot begin by natural causes.
http://evidencepress.com/articles/ultimate-irreducible-complexity/

Cellular transport systems:
Gated transport is called thus due to it's similarity to our everyday experience of passing through a guarded (electronically or otherwise) gate. This system require three basic components to work: an identification tag, a scanner (to verify identification) and a gate (that is activated by the scanner). The system needs all three components to work otherwise it will not work. Thus in a cell, when a protein is to be manufactured, one of the first steps is for the mRNA [c] to be transported out from the nucleus into the cytoplasm. This requires gated transport of the mRNA at the nuclear pore. Proteins in the pore reads a signal from the RNA (the scanner reads the identification tag) and opens the pore (gate is opened).
http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/behe.html

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
“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.”

“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect 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 nonliving world.”


Firstly, consider the gaseous mixture. This was supposed to replicate the primeval atmosphere on the Earth. You will notice that there is an absence of oxygen and nitrogen which are the main elemental constituents of our present environment. The problem recognised by Miller and his colleagues was that oxygen would destroy any organic material in the experiment and certainly in the period of time they allocated to the early period on the planet. For example, when we die, we decay. A part of that process (in addition to bacterial action) is the oxidation of the organic materials in the body, generating carbon dioxide and water. Consequently, evolutionary scientists have proposed that the early Earth had no elemental oxygen. It would, in fact, be a “reducing atmosphere”, the opposite of the modern oxidising one. (They go on to hypothesise that this would gradually change as primitive life produced oxygen through processes such as photosynthesis). However, the evidence for this reducing atmosphere is very tenuous. Increasingly we are finding from geological and palaeontological research that an oxygen-based atmosphere must have existed from the earliest times. But, we can ask whether the atmosphere proposed by Miller was likely to be stable. Abelson reports that the ammonia in the atmosphere would have decomposed within 30,000 years: it is inherently unstable, decomposing into nitrogen and hydrogen. Also, much of it would dissolve out of the atmosphere due to its great solubility in water. Methane would only have lasted for about 1% of the time required for the appearance of life by this process, according to Shimzu. Brinkman has shown that even the water vapour would have been broken down due to the sun’s radiation. The trouble is that we think of these gases as stable – indeed they are relative to our lifetime, but not on the evolutionary timescales. And hydrogen? We know that hydrogen does not exist as an element on this planet: it escapes into space very rapidly due to its low density. Various other alternative atmospheres have been proposed, but these either don’t generate the materials required or are faced with similar problems to those mentioned for Miller’s work.

http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/content/article/51.html


The absence of the required atmosphere.
Our present atmosphere consists of 78% nitrogen (N2), 21% molecular oxygen (O2), and 1% of other gases, such as carbon dioxide CO2), argon (Ar), and water vapor H2O). An atmosphere containing free oxygen would be fatal to all origin of life schemes. While oxygen is necessary for life, free oxygen would oxidize and thus destroy all organic molecules required for the origin of life. Thus, in spite of much evidence that the earth has always had a significant quantity of free oxygen in the atmosphere,3 evolutionists persist in declaring that there was no oxygen in the earth's early atmosphere. However, this would also be fatal to an evolutionary origin of life. If there were no oxygen there would be no protective layer of ozone surrounding the earth. Ozone is produced by radiation from the sun on the oxygen in the atmosphere, converting the diatomic oxygen(O2) we breathe to triatomic oxygen O3), which is ozone. Thus if there were no oxygen there would be no ozone. The deadly destructive ultraviolet light from the sun would pour down on the surface of the earth unimpeded, destroying those organic molecules required for life, reducing them to simple gases, such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water. Thus, evolutionists face an irresolvable dilemma: in the presence of oxygen, life could not evolve; without oxygen, thus no ozone, life could not evolve or exist.
http://www.icr.org/article/few-reasons-evolutionary-origin-life-impossible/


DNA is a super-molecule which stores coded hereditary information. It consists of two long “chains” of chemical “building blocks” paired together. In humans, the strands of DNA are almost 2 yards long [approx. 1.82 meters], yet less than a trillionth of an inch thick [approx. 0.0000254 microns].
In function, DNA is somewhat like a computer program on a floppy disk. It stores and transfers encoded information and instructions. It is said that the DNA of a human stores enough information code to fill 1,000 books each with 500 pages of very small, closely-printed type.  The DNA code produces a product far more sophisticated than that of any computer.


Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition (Santee, California: Master Book Publishers, 1988), p. 8
"When Watson and Crick discovered the helical structure of the DNA molecule and the general way that it coded the formation and replication of proteins in cells, there were great expectations that a plausible scientific explanation for the origin of life was just over the horizon. The laboratory synthesis of amino acids from basic chemicals further heightened the expectations that man, with all his intelligence and resources, could synthesize a living cell. These hopes have also been dashed with the failure to generate life in the laboratory, and researchers are stating that new natural laws will need to be discovered to explain how the high degree of order and specificity of even a single cell could be generated by random, natural processes."

George Howe, expert in biological sciences
"The chance that useful DNA molecules would develop without a Designer are approximately zero. Then let me conclude by asking which came first the DNA (which is essential for the synthesis of proteins) or the protein enzyme (DNA-polymerase) without which DNA synthesis is nil? there is virtually no chance that chemical 'letters' would spontaneously produce coherent DNA and protein 'words'."

Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (Aldine House, 33 Welbeck Street, London W1M 8LX: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), p. 148, 24, 150, 30, 31
"Life cannot have had a random beginning The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10 to the 20th) to the 2,000th = 10 to the 40,000th, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.
If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court. The enormous information content of even the simplest living systems cannot in our view be generated by what are often called “natural” processes For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly. There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago."

"The notion that not only the biopolymers, but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order Quite a few of my astronomical friends are considerable mathematicians, and once they become interested enough to calculate for themselves, instead of relying on hearsay argument, they can quickly see this point."
"True, the problem is not discussed openly in the main stream of biological literature, but one comes on small fragments published in obscure corners by writers who have evidently perceived the problem and been acutely worried by it. Having made their protest against current dogma, such writers seem always to have been prepared to let the matter drop, as no doubt they encountered the same kind of opposition that Chandra Wickramasinghe and I have run into My impression is that most biologists really know in their hearts the issue is there, but are so appalled by its implications that they are prepared to swallow any line of thought to avoid it. if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterialists with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. problems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture."
http://christiananswers.net/q-eden/origin-of-life.html


Arthur V. Chadwick, Ph.D. Abiogenic Origin of Life: A Theory in Crisis  2005
Given an ocean full of small molecules of the types likely to be produced on a prebiological earth with the types of processes postulated by origin of life enthusiasts, we must next approach the question of polymerization. This question poses a two edged sword: we must first demonstrate that macromolecule synthesis is possible under prebiological conditions, then we must construct a rationale for generating macromolecules rich in the information necessary for usefulness in a developing precell. We shall deal with these separately.

The synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids from small molecule precursors represents one of the most difficult challenges to the model of prebiological evolution. There are many different problems confronted by any proposal. Polymerization is a reaction in which water is a product. Thus it will only be favored in the absence of water. The presence of precursors in an ocean of water favors depolymerization of any molecules that might be formed. Careful experiments done in an aqueous solution with very high concentrations of amino acids demonstrate the impossibility of significant polymerization in this environment. A thermodynamic analysis of a mixture of protein and amino acids in an ocean containing a 1 molar solution of each amino acid (100,000,000 times higher concentration than we inferred to be present in the prebiological ocean) indicates the concentration of a protein containing just 100 peptide bonds (101 amino acids) at equilibrium would be 10-338 molar. Just to make this number meaningful, our universe may have a volume somewhere in the neighborhood of 1085 liters. At 10-338 molar, we would need an ocean with a volume equal to 10229 universes (100, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) just to find a single molecule of any protein with 100 peptide bonds. So we must look elsewhere for a mechanism to produce polymers. It will not happen in the ocean.

Sidney Fox, an amino acid chemist, and one of my professors in graduate school, recognized the problem and set about constructing an alternative. Since water is unfavorable to peptide bond formation, the absence of water must favor the reaction. Fox attempted to melt pure crystalline amino acids in order to promote peptide bond formation by driving off water from the mix. He discovered to his dismay that most amino acids broke down to a tarry degradation product long before they melted. After many tries he discovered two of the 20 amino acids, aspartic and glutamic acid, would melt to a liquid at about 200oC. He further discovered that if he were to dissolve the other amino acids in the molten aspartic and glutamic acids, he could produce a melt containing up to 50% of the remaining 18 amino acids. It was no surprise then that the amber liquid, after cooking for a few hours , contained polymers of amino acids with some of the properties of proteins. He subsequently named the product proteinoids. The polymerized material can be poured into an aqueous solution, resulting in the formation of spherules of protein-like material which Fox has likened to cells. Fox has claimed nearly every conceivable property for his product, including that he had bridged the macromolecule to cell transition. He even went so far as to demonstrate a piece of lava rock could substitute for the test tube in proteinoid synthesis and claimed the process took place on the primitive earth on the flanks of volcanoes. However, his critics as well as his own students have stripped his credibility. Note the following problems:

1) Proteinoids are not proteins; they contain many non-peptide bonds and unnatural cross-linkages.
2) The peptide bonds they do contain are beta bonds, whereas all biological peptide bonds are alpha.
3) His starting materials are purified amino acids bearing no resemblance to the materials available in the "dilute soup." If one were to try the experiment with condensed "prebiological soup," tar would be the only product.
4) The ratio of 50% Glu and Asp necessary for success in these experiments bears no resemblance to the vastly higher ratio of Gly and Ala found in nearly all primitive earth synthesis experiments.
5) There is no evidence of information content in the molecules.

All of his claims have failed the tests of rationality when examined carefully. As promising as his approach seemed in theory, the reality is catastrophic to the hopes of paleobiogeochemists.

A number of other approaches have been tried. The most optimistic of these is the use of clays. Clays are very thin, very highly ordered arrays of complex aluminum silicates with numerous other cations. In this environment, the basic amino groups tend to order and polymers of several dozen amino acids have been produced. While these studies have generated enthusiastic interest on the part of prebiological evolutionists, their relevance is quickly dampened by several factors.

1) While ordered amino acids joined by peptide bonds result, the product contains no meaningful information.
2) The clays exhibit a preference for basic amino acids.
3) No polymerization of amino acids results if free amino acids are used.
4) Pure activated amino acids attached to adenine must be used in order to drive the reaction toward polymerization. Adenylated amino acids are not exactly the most likely substrate to be floating about the prebiological ocean.
5) The resultant polymers are three dimensional rather than linear, as is required for biopolymers.

At least one optimistic scientist (Cairns-Smith, 1982) believes that the clay particles themselves formed the substance of the first organisms! In reality, the best one can hope for from such a scenario is a racemic polymer of proteinous and non proteinous amino acids with no relevance to living systems.

A final chapter has recently been opened with the discovery of autocatalytic RNA molecules. These were originally received with great excitement by the prebiological evolutionists because they gave hope of alleviating the need to make proteins in the first cell. These so-called "ribozymes" proved incapable of rising to the occasion, however, for not only are the molecules themselves very limited in what they have been shown capable of doing, but the production of the precursors of RNA by any prebiological mechanism considered thus far is a problem at least as difficult as the one ribozymes purport to solve:

1) While ribose can be produced under simulated prebiological conditions via the formose reaction, it is a rare sugar in formaldehyde polymers (the prebiological mechanism believed to have given rise to sugars). In addition the presence of nitrogenous substances such as amino acids in the reaction mixture would prevent sugar synthesis (Shapiro, 1988). Cairns-Smith (1993) has summarized the situation as follows:"Sugars are particularly trying. While it is true that they form from formaldehyde solutions, these solutions have to be far more concentrated than would have been likely in primordial oceans. And the reaction is quite spoilt in practice by just about every possible sugar being made at the same time - and much else besides. Furthermore the conditions that form sugars also go on to destroy them. Sugars quickly make their own special kind of tar - caramel - and they make still more complicated mixtures if amino acids are around."
2) When produced and condensed with a nucleotide base, a mixture of optical isomers results, only one of which is relevant to prebiological studies.
3) Polymerization of nucleotides is inhibited by the incorporation of such an enantiomorph.
4) While only 3'-5' polymers occur in biological systems, 5'-5' and 2'-5' polymers are favored in prebiological type synthetic reactions (Joyce and Orgel, 1993, but see Usher,et. al. for an interesting sidelight).
5) None of the 5 bases present in DNA/RNA are produced during HCN oligomerization in dilute solutions (the prebiological mechanism believed to give rise to nucleotide bases). And many other non-coding bases would compete during polymerization at higher concentrations of HCN.

In addition to the problems of synthesis of the precursors and the polymerization reactions, the whole scheme is dependent on the ability to synthesize an RNA molecule which is capable of making a copy of itself, a feat that so far has eluded strenuous efforts. The molecule must also perform some function vital to initiating life force. So far all of this talk of an "RNA World" remains wishful thinking best categorized as fiction. The most devastating indictment of the scheme however, is that it offers no clue as to how one gets from such a scheme to the DNA-RNA-Protein mechanism of all living cells. The fact that otherwise rational scientists would exhibit such rampant enthusiasm for this scheme so quickly reveals how little faith they have in all other scenarios for the origin of life, including the ones discussed above.

http://origins.swau.edu/papers/life/chadwick/default.html

This article refers to both the work of Dr. Hubert P. Yockey and the laboratory experiments of Dr. R.T. Sauer (MIT), who extensively analyzed the make-up of actual proteins from living cells. The work of these scientists does take into account that there is a small degree of interchangeability of a certain amino acid or two along the sequence of a protein, and the protein still being able to retain some function. ...However, this experimental evidence still indicates that functional classes of proteins are extremely rare among the possible chains of junk sequences that are most likely to assemble by chance. --Despite some amino acid interchangeability, the result of these experiments is that the odds of assembling (by random processes) one new functional protein (which properly folds), are about one chance in 1065. --- (1065 is the number one, with 65 zeros behind it, and is about the number of atoms in all the matter in an average galaxy.) So, the odds of one new functional protein assembling by the random chance processes, would be the equivalent of randomly finding one specific atom out of the galaxy.
http://worldview3.50webs.com/abiogenesis.html

If the cell had evolved it would have had to be all at once. A partially evolved cell cannot wait millions of years to become complete because it would be highly unstable and quickly disintegrate in the open environment, especially without the protection of a complete and fully functioning cell membrane. And even having a complete cell doesn't necessarily mean there will be life. After all, even a dead cell is complete shortly after it dies! Of course, once there is a complete and living cell then the genetic code and other biological mechanisms exist to direct the formation of more cells. The question is how could life have arisen naturally when there was no directing mechanism at all in Nature.
The great British scientist Sir Frederick Hoyle has said that the probability of the sequence of molecules in the simplest cell coming into existence by chance is equivalent to a tornado going through a junk yard of airplane parts and assembling a 747 Jumbo Jet! Thanks to popular evolutionist writers like Richard Dawkins, many in society have come to believe that natural selection will solve all of evolution's problems. Natural selection cannot produce anything. It can only "select" from what is produced. Furthermore, natural selection operates only once there is life and not before.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/05-08-2008/105990-origin_life-0/

"We are now ready to handle the chances for the spontaneous generation of a bacterium. ... Many scientists have attempted such calculations; we need cite only two of them to make the point. The first was provided by Sir Fred Hoyle, whose ideas we shall discuss in detail later in the book. He and his colleague, N. C. Wickramasinghe, first endorsed spontaneous generation, then abruptly reversed their position. Why did they do this? Quite obviously, they calculated the odds. Rather than estimate the chances for an entire bacterium, they considered only the set of functioning enzymes present in one. Their starting point was not a complex mixture, but rather the set of twenty L-form amino acids that are used to construct biological enzymes. If amino acids were selected at random from this set one at a time and arranged in order, what would be the chances that this process would produce an actual bacterial product? For a typical enzyme of 200 amino acids, the odds would be obtained by multiplying the probability for each amino acid, 1 in 20, together 200 times. The result, 1 in 10120 [sic] , places us on floor 120 of the Tower of Numbers, immensely higher than the level where we find the number of trials. Things need not be that bad, however. What matters is the function of the enzyme, rather than the exact order of amino acids within it. A large number of amino acid sequences might provide enzymes with the proper function. With this in mind, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe estimated that the chances of obtaining an enzyme of the appropriate type at random were `only' 1 in 1020 . To duplicate a bacterium, however, one would have to assemble 2,000 different functioning enzymes. The odds against this event would be 1 in 1020 multiplied together 2,000 times, or 1 in 1040,000 . This particular item would then be available on floor 40,000 of the Tower of Numbers. If we consider that the number of trials brought us only to the fifty-first floor, we can understand why Hoyle changed his mind. His estimate of the likelihood of the event was that it was comparable to the chance that `a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.' ["Hoyle on evolution," Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p.105] In fact, things are much worse. A tidy set of twenty amino acids, all in the L-form, was not likely to be available on the early earth. This situation has not even been approached by the very best Miller-Urey experiments. Nor does a set of enzymes constitute a living bacterium." (Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, pp.125,127-128)
http://creationevolutiondesign.blogspot.com.br/2007/01/origin-of-life-fatal-fault-of.html

The Origin of Life did not Happen by Chance
If creation by God is not an option, then random chemicals got together and formed the first living cell. If this could happen (it has never been proven) how are we sure it would be alive? A dead body has as many cells as a live body. “Life” is something outside of just the physical components of biology.
http://x-evolutionist.com/the-origin-of-life-how-did-life-begin-dna-could-not-have-happened-by-chance/

James M. Rochford: The Origin of Life 2014
This explanation greatly underestimates the probabilities involved. Rana and Ross explain,
The probability of getting the right amino acid in a specific position in a protein molecule is 1.25 percent. (There is a 50 percent chance of natural processes randomly selecting a left-handed amino acid, a 50 percent chance of joining the two amino acids in the appropriate chemical bond, and roughly a 5 percent chance of selecting the right amino acid.) The probability of undirected processes assembling a protein one hundred amino acids long, therefore, becomes roughly one chance in 10191.
This finding has dire consequences for the naturalistic paradigm. Even if the entire primordial earth were comprised of nothing but the twenty amino acids used by the cell to produce proteins, and if those amino acids reacted to produce proteins all 100 amino acids in length, there would still be only one chance in 1083 that the desired amino acid sequence would be formed. Physicists consider any probability smaller than one chance in 1050 as equivalent to impossible.
This is why atheist Francis Crick (discoverer of DNA) writes, “The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.”
https://www.evidenceunseen.com/articles/science-and-scripture/the-origin-of-life/

Biologists currently estimate that the smallest life form as we know it would have needed about 256 genes. (See Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Volume 93, Number 19, pp. 10268-10273 at http://journals.at-home.com/get_doc/1854083/8551). A gene is typically 1000 or more base pairs long, and there is some space in between, so 256 genes would amount to about 300,000 bases of DNA. The deoxyribose in the DNA ``backbone'' determines the direction in which it will spiral. Since organic molecules can be generated in both forms, the chance of obtaining all one form or another in 300,000 bases is one in two to the 300,000 power. This is about one in 10 to the 90,000 power. It seems to be necessary for life that all of these bases spiral in the same direction. Now, if we imagine many, many DNA molecules being formed in the early history of the earth, we might have say 10 100 molecules altogether (which is really much too high). But even this would make the probability of getting one DNA molecule right about one in 10 to the 89,900 power, still essentially zero. And we are not even considering what proteins the DNA generates, or how the rest of the cell structure would get put together! So the real probability would be fantastically small. Biologists are hypothesizing some RNA-based life form that might have had a smaller genome and might have given rise to a cell with about 256 genes. Until this is demonstrated, one would have to say that the problem of abiogenesis is very severe indeed for the theory of evolution.
http://tasc-creationscience.org/other/plaisted/www.cs.unc.edu/_plaisted/ce/abiogenesis.html

Martin A. Nowak: Prevolutionary dynamics and the origin of evolution  September 12, 2008
Life is that which replicates and evolves. The origin of life is also the origin of evolution. A fundamental question is when do chemical kinetics become evolutionary dynamics? Here, we formulate a general mathematical theory for the origin of evolution. All known life on earth is based on biological polymers, which act as information carriers and catalysts. Therefore, any theory for the origin of life must address the emergence of such a system. We describe prelife as an alphabet of active monomers that form random polymers. Prelife is a generative system that can produce information. Prevolutionary dynamics have selection and mutation, but no replication. Life marches in with the ability of replication: Polymers act as templates for their own reproduction. Prelife is a scaffold that builds life. Yet, there is competition between life and prelife. There is a phase transition: If the effective replication rate exceeds a critical value, then life outcompetes prelife. Replication is not a prerequisite for selection, but instead, there can be selection for replication. Mutation leads to an error threshold between life and prelife.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/11/0806714105.abstract

"Evolutionary dynamics are a universal principle. They can operate with whatever is at hand," said Nowak. 2

Addy Pross: The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know 2013 Mar; 3
The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. 
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539-011-9298-7

David Deamer: The Role of Lipid Membranes in Life’s Origin 2017 Mar; 7
In a living cell, abasic sites left by depurination are quickly repaired by the action of specific enzymes, but in prebiotic conditions adenine and guanine would be lost at a certain rate from any nucleotide or nucleic acid. Another spontaneous reaction is the deamination of cytosine to produce uracil. This was recognized by Shapiro [80] as an important problem related to the origin of a genetic code.
Carbohydrates are also subject to chemical damage. For instance, amine groups can react with ribose and other sugars to produce cross linking in the Maillard reaction. Reducing sugars can also react with other sugar molecules at higher temperatures, a process called caramelization. In both cases this produces the familiar brown polymer present in all baked or grilled food, but would interfere with the synthesis of biologically relevant bonds.
Undesired crosslinking reactions. At ordinary temperature ranges in aqueous solution there is insufficient activation energy to drive random crosslinking between biologically relevant monomers, and the thermodynamically favored decomposition reaction is hydrolysis. When solutions are dehydrated by evaporation, solutes become concentrated, and in the anhydrous state the thermodynamic balance shifts from hydrolysis to the condensation reactions described earlier.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/



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The origin of life, by Leslie E. Orgel
The immensity of the problem is rarely appreciated by laymen, and is generally ignored by evolutionary scientists, themselves. The simplest form of life imaginable would require hundreds of different kinds of molecules, perhaps thousands, most of them large and very complex. With respect to this point, Van Rensselaer Potter states, "It is possible to hazard a guess that the number is not less than 1,000, but whether it is 3,000 or 10,000 or greater is anyone's guess."2 This statement not only acknowledges the immensity of the problem, but also is a tacit admission of how little is really known or knowable about the problem. In addition to these many molecules, which would include the large and complex protein, DNA and RNA molecules, each with up to several hundred subunits arranged in a precise sequence, the origin of life would require many complex and dynamically functional structures, such as membranes, ribosomes, mitochondria (or energy-producing complexes of some kind), etc. Furthermore, life requires marvelous coordination in time and space, with many regulatory mechanisms. To believe that all of this came about by mere chemical and physical processes, does indeed constitute an immense exercise of faith. The precise events giving rise to the RNA world remain unclear. As we have seen, investigators have proposed many hypotheses, but evidence in favor of each of them is fragmentary at best. The full details of how the RNA world, and life, emerged may not be revealed in the near future.

First Life 1
The very first life form on earth. What was it? What did it look like? When did it appear? How did it come to be? These are all very good questions. Questions which are usually answered with more imagination than actual science since we weren’t there to observe of course. But the biggest question has to be the “how.” It is the “how,” that plagues the scientist’s mind when it comes to the first life.
There are only two means by which the first life could have appeared: natural origins or supernatural origins. Natural origins means the life came from non-living chemicals. Supernatural origins means the life came from an Intelligent Designer, a Creator God. Now immediately science throws out supernatural origins because it is of course not natural, and therefore, in the minds of most scientists, not science. Yet science itself cannot seem to yield any satisfying answers to the origin of life on earth. If life came from non-life, this brings with it a wide variety of problems and dead ends.

The Environment Problem
As much as we understand this planet to be hospitable for life, it is only hospitable for life fitted to live on it. For example, oxygen and water are required for life to exist, but are also detrimental to the internal components of an organism.
Let us take oxygen for example: It is a poisonous gas that oxidizes organic material.[1] The only way organisms can tolerate it is because they are already capable of tolerating it, with membranes that protect oxygen from damaging internal components of the cell. Therefore there is no way the organisms could have evolved from non-living material unless protective membranes were already present to protect the vulnerable internal organelles from oxidization. What are the odds that the first life form ever just so happened to have a protective membrane already in place?
Some evolutionists argue that this is not a problem because it assumes oxygen was not present in the early atmosphere of earth, and therefore not a threat. But the evidence does not support this claim. Even earth’s oldest rocks contain evidence of formation in an oxygen rich atmosphere.[2] Atmospheric physicists believe the earth has been fully oxidized for at least 4 billion years.[3] A fairly recent article published on crystals dated to 4.4 billion years ago show heavy evidence of oxidation.[4] Additionally, oxygen is needed for life as protection from harmful UV rays which we have via from the ozone layer, which is made out of oxygen![5] If there was no oxygen UV rays would eradicate all early life forms. Biochemist and molecular biologist Michael Denton writes, “What we have is sort of a ‘Catch 22’ situation. If we have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don’t have oxygen we have none either.”[6]
To get around this concern of oxidization, scientists propose life formulated in the oceans and therefore was not subjected to oxygen initially. But just as with oxygen, water is hazardous to life as well. Organic molecules would be destroyed through the process of hydrolysis (also called “water splitting”) in which water bonds between two molecules causing them to split apart.[7] Any amino acid trying to form a protein would have its bond broken in a short matter of time. The US National Academy of Sciences confirms, “In water, the assembly of nucleosides from component sugars and nucleobases, the assembly of nucleotides from nucleosides and phosphate, and the assembly of oligonucleotides from nucleotides are all thermodynamically uphill in water. Two amino acids do not spontaneously join in water. Rather, the opposite reaction is thermodynamically favored at any plausible concentrations: polypeptide chains spontaneously hydrolyze in water, yielding their constituent amino acids.”[8] Physicist Richard Morris concurs, “… water tends to break chains of amino acids. If any proteins had formed in the ocean 3.5 billion years ago, they would have quickly disintegrated.”[9] Thus, the first life form would have needed a protective membrane already in place to protect it from oxygen and water. Yet, where did this membrane come from?
Additionally, the cytoplasm of living cells contain essential minerals of potassium, zinc, manganese and phosphate ions. If cells manifested naturally, these minerals would need to be present nearby. But marine environments do not have widespread concentrations of these minerals.[10] This has lead researchers to propose that life originated not in oceans, and not in locations exposed to oxygen, but instead in geothermal pools, geysers and mudpools, much like the primordial soup Darwin proposed. Yet all these geothermal features have one thing in common: They are incredibly acidic.[11] They also tend to be very hot, which would destroy many vital amino acids.[12] How did the cell develop protection from this acidity and from this heat? Without such protection initially it could have never come together.
Some speculate that natural selection of non-living chemicals provided such protective features. This is, however, a common error some scientists make in this arena when they propose natural selection occurred for these protective systems to be in place. As Chemist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati points out, “…when it comes to the origin of first life, natural selection cannot be invoked, because natural selection is differential reproduction. That is, if it worked at all, it could only work on a living organism that could produce offspring. By its very definition, it could not work on non-living chemicals. Therefore, chance alone must produce the precise sequences needed, so these simulations do not apply.”[13]
A significant problem with proposing life arose spontaneously via natural means is that in order to do so, the components of the cell would have to be naturally nearby. In other words, the cell’s chemical makeup would have to be harmonious with the environment’s chemical make up. UniversityCollegeof Londonbiochemist Nick Lanepoints out the problem with this, “To suggest that the ionic composition of primordial cells should reflect the composition of the oceans is to suggest that cells are in equilibrium with their medium, which is close to saying that they are not alive. Cells require dynamic disequilibrium — that is what being alive is all about.”[14] This is a tough fact to accept, but undoubtedly true. How could the first life form have naturally manifested via chemical means with a chemical make up so different and unique from the environment it is within
The Homochirality Problem
Moving forward brings forth a new set of problems when amino acids are discussed. Often amino acids are discovered in locations where it is suggested they are naturally produced (like being found in meteorites). When this happens there is usually a hype of excitement over uncovering the source of the origin of life via natural means. But simply having amino acids around doesn’t solve the origin of life problem. There is an issue of handedness with amino acids. Out of the twenty amino acids used for life, the atoms that build them formulate two different shapes; right handed and left-handed amino acids. Just like a human hand, they’re slightly different. Your thumb is on the left side on one hand, but on the right side on the other. Amino acids are likewise mirror images of each other and are therefore called chiral.
But this creates a problem. Just like hands clasping together, right and left handed amino acids want to bond, canceling each other out. Yet, the amino acids found in proteins are 100% left handed, where as right handed amino acids are never found in proteins![15] Research indicates that right handed amino acids could never form a functioning protein. The fact that only left handed amino acids can create life is called homochirality. Yet any natural process of creating amino acids would create and equal amount of both left handed and right handed amino acids calledracemates.[16]
 Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Amino-acid-chirality
One of the most influential chemist/biochemists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling, writes, “This is a very puzzling fact… All the proteins that have been investigated, obtained from animals and from plants from higher organisms and from very simple  organisms- bacteria, molds, even viruses- are found to have been made of L-amino acids.”[17] This is puzzling of course because what natural process only produces one type of amino acid, and not the other amino acid detrimental to life? The late Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University writes, “The reason for this choice [only L-amino acids] is again a mystery, and a subject of continued dispute.”[18] Biochemist and head of the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Director of Clinical Research at the Singapore General Hospital, Dr. Aw Swee-Eng, is more direct on the subject, “The logical conclusion from these considerations is a simple and parsimonious one, that homochirality and life came together. But evolutionary lore forbids such a notion. It claims to explain how life began, but on the profound issue of life’s “handedness” there is no selective mechanism that it can plausibly endorse.”[19]

The Concept of Information
One factor that is sometimes left out in origin of life talks, that is in my opinion, critical, is the concept of information. All living organisms contain within their DNA information, and not just a little, but a lot! Former physics professor and director of information processing at the Instituteof Physicsand Technology in Braunschweig Germany, Dr. Werner Gitt, writes, “The highest known (statistical) information density is obtained in living cells, exceeding by far the best achievements of highly integrated storage densities in computer systems.”[20] This information leads to highly efficient bio-machinery in our cells that complete a vast array of functions. Every biological function that occurs can be traced back to proteins from genes from reading and transcribing RNA that receives the instructions from the information stored in DNA. It doesn’t simply just happen. It is an immensely complex, sophisticated and detailed process occurring non-stop and very rapidly. In fact, the average cell produces a protein through these processes every four minutes.[21]
Any theory or hypothesis to how life originated naturally must take the source of this information into account. Yet, none can be found. Gitt writes, “There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.”[22] Biologist Dr. Raymond Bohlin writes, “DNA is information code… The overwhelming conclusion is that information does not and cannot arise spontaneously by mechanistic processes. Intelligence is a necessity in the origin of any informational code, including the genetic code, no matter how much time is given.”[23] Philosopher of Science and founder of the Discovery Institute, Dr. Stephen Meyer, writes, “Our uniform experience affirms that specified information-whether inscribed hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in a radio signal, or produced in a simulation experiment-always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind and not a strictly material process.”[24]
Thus, we are left with no natural method or process by which non-living chemicals can produce the informational code found in every life form that as ever existed. Biologist, Chemist and Physiologist Dr. Gary Parker writes, “Imagine that you have just finished reading a fabulous novel. Wanting to read another book like it, you exclaim to a friend, ‘Wow! That was quite a book. I wonder where I can get a bottle of that ink?’ Of course not! You wouldn’t give the ink and paper credit for writing the book. You’d praise the author, and look for another book by the same writer. By some twist of logic, though, many who read the fabulous DNA script want to give credit to the ‘ink (DNA base code) and paper (proteins)’ for composing the code.”[25]

Not Enough Time
With all things considered, many scientists try to jettison out the first life dilemma with the “time” argument. The argument being that given enough time anything can happen! Even the impossible…
The late Nobel prize winning scientist George Wald once wrote, “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.”[26]
Now let us logically think about this. Given enough time, anything is possible? First, I feel pressed to point out that there is something irrational in saying that because something is possible, it will occur. Or anything that can happen,will happen. It is possible that in flipping a coin every minute for fifty years you will get heads every time and never tails… but that doesn’t mean it will happen if you tried. Regardless, the notion that given enough time anything can happen is hardly scientific in my opinion, because it flies in the face of observational science. For example, the Law of Biogenesis which firmly points out that life has only been observed coming from existing life, never from non-life. There is also cell theory, which states that cells arise from pre-existing cells. Regardless of the amount of time tacked onto the issue, the law cannot change, and the dimension of time has no characteristic capable of changing this law.
Let us take for example a chair placed in a room. The chair remains in the room for one hundred years, then a thousand years, and eventually billions of years. At any point would that chair become organic or “living” in anyway? Of course not. It would remain just a chair forever. Why? Because there is nothing inherent in non-living molecules that drive them to arrange themselves into living structures. If there were, they’d be doing so to this day at an observable rate. Such is not the case. Life comes from life, and non-life remains non-life everyday.
Another flaw in this argument is the amount of time in question. Such statements like Wald’s seem to have at least a small degree of plausibility in perhaps an infinite time scenario, but time is not infinite. It definitely had a starting point. A starting point which conventional scientists place at 12 to 14 billion years ago. That is a major constraint on how long time is allowed to work its magic. Cosmologist Dr. Hugh Ross writes, “When it comes to the origin of life, many biologists (and others) have typically assumed that plenty of time is available for natural processes to perform the necessary assembly. But discoveries about the universe and the solar system have shattered that assumption. What we see now is that life must have originated on earth quickly.”[27]
This constraint worsens though because conventional geology and biology places the first life forming 3.5 billion years ago, and the earth is only supposedly 4.5 billion years old. So from a naturalist’s or uniformitarian’s point of view there was a billion years from the time earth was formed to the first fossil evidence of life, from which life is said to have manifested. A billion years is a significant time constraint.
Yet, the time constraint worsens further. From a conventional scientist’s perspective adhering to the nebular hypothesis of sun and planet formation, time is further restricted. The first millions of years would have been one of intense meteorite bombardment of earth as the solar system was forming. These intense meteorite bombardments would have eradicated any chance of life forming on earth. By the time these impacts are calculated to have ceased and the time of the first life forms appearing in the fossil record we’re left with a 10 million year gap.[28] That is an enormous time constraint. Additionally, some scientists propose this time frame was shorter because of the “faint sun paradox.” Namely, that the sun was 20 to 30% less luminous when it first existed, creating a very cold inhospitable world.[29]This makes it difficult to apply Ward’s philosophy of an abundance of time making the impossible possible because there is, for lack of a better phrase, hardly any time at all…
In fact, Nobel Prize winning cytologist and biochemist Christian de Duve states, “It is now generally agreed that if life arose spontaneously by natural processes—a necessary assumption if we wish to remain within the realm of science—it must have arisen fairly quickly, more in a matter of millennia or centuries, perhaps even less.”[30] So much for having all the time in the world.
Lastly, I do feel it is necessary to point out the entropy dilemma when it comes to time. The more time that elapses the higher the entropy, so if anything more time doesn’t make anything possible, but in fact, decreases the potential of anything to happen. As biochemist Dr. Royal Truman writes, “The claim that, with time, anything is possible, including the creation and perpetuation of life, is not based on any scientific principle. Rather, the opposite is true: complex and improbable structures of any kind tend to disintegrate over time.”[31] Sarfati agrees, “Long time periods do not help the evolutionary theory if biochemicals are destroyed faster than they are formed.”[32]

Panspermia; DNA astronauts
The difficulty with life spontaneously arising via chemical means is such a problematic concept that it lead Nobel Prize winner and DNA founder Francis Crick to instead postulate that life originated someplace else and traveled to earth via meteorite or space craft.[33] He admits, correctly, that this does not solve the origin of life problem, but merely pushes it back to another location, but that is precisely the point. He proposes that another life bearing planet may have had a slightly different environment more hospitable for the natural chemical means for life to originate.[34] This theory relies on the hypothetical existence of other such life bearing planets to which there is no scientific evidence of, period.
Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Origin-of-life
There is additionally a whole host of other problems with Panspermia. How do living cells survive an arduously long space flight on a meteorite? Let us not forget how far away the nearest star is much less the nearest hypothetical life bearing planet. Think of how difficult it would be to create and engineer a capsule to keep living cells alive for thousands of years of space flight, yet a random natural meteorite is capable of doing the job? DNA would have succumb to radiation exposure over such a long period of time in space flight. How did the DNA withstand the lethal radiation? So, these same cells that defied death in thousands (if not millions) of years of freezing space exposed to lethal radiation then somehow survived a scorching hot entry into earth’s atmosphere to reproduce on earth’s surface? As chemist Russell Grigg puts it, “All in all, interstellar space travel for living organisms is sheer wishful thinking.”[35]
What about contamination? Many of the meteorites found on earth claimed to have evidence of microbial life could just have easily had been contaminated with microbial life after they landed. Contamination is the number one reason why all these claims have been rejected actually.
To get around these concerns, many scientists instead believe meteorites and comets didn’t have life per se, but had the building blocks of life on them. But this circles back around to the original reason why panspermia was imagined in the first place. The building blocks of life were already present on earth. Adding more to the mix via meteorites doesn’t in anyway increase the likelihood of life arising via chemical means anyways. Ross brings up another good point, “Though comets, meteorites partly composed of carbon, and interplanetary dust particles may carry some prebiotics, they carry far too few to make a difference. In fact, with every helpful molecule they bring, come several more that would get in the way- useless molecules that would substitute for the needed ones.”[36] Life developing from nonliving chemicals is hard enough to prove, but suggesting life was seeded by meteorites from hypothetical life elsewhere in the universe is flat out impossible to prove. Yet, likewise, impossible to disprove… and so many cling to this notion to avoid a supernatural cause.

From Bolts to Boeing 747s
Many scientists additionally fail to properly distinguish the building blocks of life and living organisms themselves. Parker writes, “The pyramids are made of stone, but studying the stone does not even begin to explain how the pyramids were built. Similarly, until evolutionists begin to explain the origin of the ‘orderly mechanism,’ they have not even begun to talk about the origin of life.”[37]Just as there is a huge void between the bolts and small parts of a 747 to them actually all being carefully assembled into a fully functioning 747, likewise, the simple building blocks of life are organized in an immensely complex way in even the most primitive of organisms.
Hoyle writes of this airplane analogy, “What are the chances that a tornado might blow through a junkyard containing all the parts of a 747, accidentally assemble them into a plane, and leave it ready for take off? The possibilities are so small as to be negligible even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards t fill the whole universe!”[38]Botanist Alexander Williams states, “There is an unbridgeable abyss below the autopoietic hierarchy, between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environment and the perfect purity, the single-molecule precision, the structural specificity, and the inversely causal integration, regulation, repair, maintenance and differential reproduction of life.”[39]
According to molecular biophysicist Harold Morowitz If you were to take a living cell, break every chemical bond within it so that all you are left with is the raw molecular ingredients, the odds of them all reassembling back into a cell (under ideal natural conditions) is one chance in 10100,000,000,000.[40] Additionally, Morowitz assumed all amino acids were bioactive when calculating these odds.[41] But only twenty different types of amino acids are bioactive, and of those, only left handed ones can be used for life. This further worsens the odds… And with odds like that, time is completely irrelevant because no amount of time could surpass before such an impossible miracle occurred naturally.
Non-theists counter argue that life was not necessarily as complex in the beginning as it is today. Therefore, the odds of a less complex form of life spontaneously assembling are much more probable. The problem with this counter argument is that the earth 3.5 billion years ago was supposedly hardly different at all (environment and atmosphere-wise) than earth today. Meaning the bare necessities required for life to exist on earth today were the same in the past, which is that of great complexity. Additionally minimum complexity presents its own problems in that minimally complex organisms require other larger organisms to survive and are not capable of surviving individually. Thus the first life and its subsequent offspring would have had to have been able to survive independently which requires sophisticated biological features.
Astronomer Michael Hart calculated the odds of DNA spontaneously generating with 100 specific genes (what he declared to be the minimum possible for life) in the most unrealistic yet optimistic conditions over the course of ten billion years. The odds? One in ten to the negative three thousandth power (10-3,000).[42] The time it would take for 200,000 amino acids to come together by chance to create one human cell would be 293.5 times the estimated age of earth of 4.6 billion years.[43] The Director of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware, Dermott Mullan, calculates that the odds of RNA assembling into a primitive cell over the course of an optimistic 1 billion years is one in 1079.[44] Material scientist Dr. Walter Bradley and Chemist Dr. Charles Thaxton calculated that the probability of amino acids forming just one protein is 4.9 x 10-191.[45] The odds of amino acids coincidentally being in the precise order and folds required to make the all the enzymes required for life is 10-650.[46] These are all horrible odds for a natural origin of life. Then consider that these statistics are independent of each other; the DNA would have to spontaneously generate, amino acids randomly together to form proteins in a cell, RNA assembling into a cell, etc. It is hard to accept with these odds, that anything that can happen did happen.

The Reproduction Puzzle
The late philosopher Anthony Flew, an ex-atheist, spoke of many of the philosophical troubles he had with the natural origins for life. One of which that was of great concern was reproduction. Life evolving from non-life is already such a statistical impossibility, but if it did happen, this first life would have to be able to reproduce and replicate itself. Information encoded DNA capable of driving life derived from non-living chemicals is already an absurd concept, but to contain information for replication and overall reproduction is astounding. This is from a philosophical standpoint, perplexing. It is too perfect and too coincidental that the very first life, already an impossibility, just so happened to also be able to duplicate itself. Such ability has “design” written all over it, not “chance.”

Error Protection
Even the most primitive cells today have multiple checkpoints in place to protect against errors. Cells have DNA checkpoints, where cell function momentarily pauses for special proteins to repair damaged DNA. There is an apoptosis checkpoint right before mitosis begins where specialized proteins called survivins run a “diagnostics” to determine whether the cell will proceed with mitosis or die through apoptosis. A spindle assembly checkpoint ensures chromosomes are properly bound together. Telomeres burn like fuses every time a cell divides. Once a telomere becomes too short, the cell stops dividing, usually maxing out at fifty divides.[47]  This feature controls cell division. Failure for these mentioned checkpoints to operate leads to a whole host of diseases, most notably cancers.[48]
So how did the first cell protect against errors when it reproduced? Such a capability could not have evolved, because such a capability would have been needed right from the very beginning. Without such a feature, all subsequent life would contain error-prone genetics and would not be able to function or reproduce. Mullan, points out, “A cell formed under these conditions [naturally] would truly be subject to serious uncertainties not only during day to day existence but especially during replication. The cell could hardly be considered robust.”[49] In order to maintain healthy function and reproduction, the first cell would have already needed these specialized checkpoints to guard against errors. The cells could not afford to wait thousands or millions of years for them to evolve. If they did, we wouldn’t be here.

Simultaneous Presence
In order to have fully functioning life at even the most basic kind, functioning RNA, DNA and proteins must be present. Remove any one of these from the picture and life can’t function. For example, transcription, translation and DNA replication all require systems already in place to occur. These functions could not simply have evolved because life requires them in place to begin with. As Ross states, “Thus, for life to originate mechanically, all three kinds of molecules [DNA, RNA, and proteins] would need to emerge spontaneously and simultaneously from organic compounds. Even the most optimistic of researchers agree that the chance appearance of these incredibly complex molecules at exactly the same time and place was beyond the realm of natural possibility.”[50]
Though biologists point out that some RNA has been found to act as enzymes or catalysts to perform functions that DNA or a protein would normally do, this has lead many scientists to propose that all one needs is the spontaneous generation of RNA, and it would take care of the rest. Problems with this theory is that the RNA studied to reveal these abilities was very limited, and could not account for the vast functioning seen in DNA and proteins overall. Furthermore, in order for RNA to function this way it would have to contain just as much information as the DNA and protein itself, so the issue of complexity in even the earliest life isn’t solved with RNA either. Molecular Biologist and professor at the Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Gerald F. Joyce writes, “The most reasonable interpretation is that life did not start with RNA … The transition to an RNA world, like the origins of life in general, is fraught with uncertainty and is plagued by a lack of relevant experimental data. Researchers into the origins of life have grown accustomed to the level of frustration in these problems …”[51]

Conclusion
Biologist Jonathan Wells just about sums it up, “So we remain profoundly ignorant of how life originated.”[52] Earth Scientist Casey Luskin writes, “It’s time for a little reality check here: origin-of-life theorists need to explain how a myriad of complex proteins and features arose and self-assembled into a self-replicating life-form by unguided processes, but they are still scraping for mechanisms to explain how an inert primordial soup of organic molecules could have arisen in the first place.”[53] Hoyle writes, “If there were some deep principle that drove organic systems towards living systems, the operation of the principle should easily be demonstratable in a test tube in half a morning. Needless to say, no such demonstration has ever been given. Nothing happens when organic materials are subjected to the usual prescription of showers of electrical sparks or drenched in ultraviolet light, except the eventual production of a tarry sludge,” and “As biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of live, it is apparent that its chances of originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.”[54] Physicist and Information Theorist Dr. Hubet Yockey writes, “The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated… are not discouraging to true believers . . . [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance.”[55]
Yockey then goes further to add, “The history of science shows that a paradigm, once it has achieved the status of acceptance (and is incorporated in textbooks) and regardless of its failures, is declared invalid only when a new paradigm is available to replace it. Nevertheless, in order to make progress in science, it is necessary to clear the decks, so to speak, of failed paradigms. This must be done even if this leaves the decks entirely clear and no paradigms survive. It is a characteristic of the true believer in religion, philosophy and ideology that he must have a set of beliefs, come what may… Belief in a primeval soup on the grounds that no other paradigm is available is an example of the logical fallacy of the false alternative. In science it is a virtue to acknowledge ignorance. This has been universally the case in the history of science… There is no reason that this should be different in the research on the origin of life.”[56]Biochemist and head of the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Director of Clinical Research at the Singapore General Hospital, Dr. Aw Swee-Eng, concludes, “The available evidence from the field and the laboratory is not amicable to the theory that life began with the accidental assembly of a self-replicating molecule.”[57]

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Origin-of-life


As it has been clearly demonstrated, there are a wide variety of blockades standing in the way of a natural origins answer for the first life, and no definitive solution has been reached nor can be confidently expected to be reached in the future. Yet, the other option, supernatural origins, is not subject to such obstacles. In fact, every problem a natural origin faces can be satisfactorily answered via supernatural origins. Though many scientists will not appeal to super natural intervention on the grounds that it is not science, and merely a “cut and run” for those who are too impatient to wait for future researchers to provide an adequate natural origins argument.
In response to that notion, Denton answers, “The almost irresistible force of the analogy has completely undermined the complacent assumption, prevalent in biological circles over most of the past century, that the design hypothesis can be excluded on the grounds that the notion is fundamentally a metaphysical a priori concept and therefore scientifically unsound. On the contrary, the inference to design is a purely a posteriori induction based on a ruthlessly consistent application of the logic of analogy. The conclusion may have religious implications, but it does not depend on religious presuppositions.”[58] Therefore, adhering to supernatural cause through rational deduction with proper observational science as support cannot be considered unscientific. Additionally, such a conclusion should not be considered a “cut and run” if the problems faced by natural origins can never be solved via natural means. What discovery (or discoveries) could solve the information, reproduction, environment, homochirality problems?
Physicist H. S. Lipson writes, “If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces, and radiation [i.e., time, chance, and chemistry], how has it come into being? I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation.”[59] Parker writes, “In a novel, the ink and paper are merely the means the author uses to express his or her thoughts. In the genetic code, the DNA bases and proteins are merely the means God uses to express His thoughts. The real credit for the message in a novel goes to the author, not the ink and paper, and the real credit for the genetic message in DNA goes to the Author of Life, the Creator…”[60]Medical pathologist David Demick, M.D., concludes, “Thousands of experiments, and all of the recently gained knowledge of molecular biology and genetics, have only served to strengthen the most fundamental law of biology, laid down by Virchow over a century ago: ‘omni cellules e cellules’ (all cells come from other cells), also known as the Law of Biogenesis. Life only comes from life. This was the law established by the Author of Life, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life—Jesus Christ.”[61] Griggs concludes, “Life is bristling with machinery, codes and programs, which are not an inherent property of the material substrate (the information for their construction having been passed on during reproduction). No observation has ever shown such information-bearing structures arising spontaneously. The obvious inference from science, as well as the obvious implications of Scripture, is that the original creation of living things involved the very opposite of chance, namely, the imposition of external intelligence on to matter by an original Designer or Creator.”[62]
So we’re left with a choice. Supernatural or natural? One answers all these problems, the other does not. You can hold out for a natural answer if you wish, but I would rather side with a sure thing. Logically, an Intelligent Designer, a God, is in my opinion, the only rational explanation behind the first life.





[1] Ward, P. & Brownlee, D., (2000) Rare Earth, Copernicus:New York,NY, pp. 245.
[2] Clemmey, H. & Badham, N., (1982) “Oxygen in the Atmosphere: An Evaluation of the Geological Evidence,”Geology, 10:141.
[3] Thaxton, C.B., Bradley, W.L., & Olsen, R.L., (1984) The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories,Philosophical Library:New York,NY, pp. 69-98.
[4] Trail, D., Watson, B.E., & Tailby, N.D., (December 2011) “The Oxidation State of Hadean Magmas and Implications for Earth’s Early Atmosphere,” Nature, 480: pp. 79-82.
[5] Riddle, M., (2008) “Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of Life?” as written in Ken Ham’s The New Answers Book 3, Master Books:Green Forest,AR, pp. 66.
[6] Denton, M., (1985) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Alder & Alder:Bethesda,MD, pp. 261.
[7] Riddle, M., (2008) “Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of Life?” as written in Ken Ham’s The New Answers Book 3, Master Books:Green Forest,AR, pp. 66.
[8] As quoted in Casey Luskin’s “More News Sources Admit the ‘Mystery’ of Life’s Origin,” (February 2012)http://www.evolutionnews.org
[9] Morris, R., (2002) The Big Questions, Times Books/Henry Holt:New York,NY, pp. 167.
[10] Switek, B., (February 2012) “Debate Bubbles Over the Origin of Life,” http://www.nature.com
[11] Switek, B., (February 2012) “Debate Bubbles Over the Origin of Life,” http://www.nature.com
[12] Sarfati, J., “15 Loopholes in the Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Life,” creation.com
[13] Sarfati, J., (2002) Refuting Evolution 2, Master Books:Green Forest,AR, pp. 157.
[14] As quoted in Brian Switek’s  “Debate Bubbles Over the Origin of Life,” (February 2012) http://www.nature.com
[15] Riddle, M., (2008) “Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of Life?” as written in Ken Ham’s The New Answers Book 3, Master Books:Green Forest,AR, pp. 67.
[16] Ashton, J., (2000) In Six Days, Master Books:Green Forest,AR, pp. 82.
[17] Pauling, L., (1970) General Chemistry, 3rd Ed., W.H. Freeman & Co.:San Francisco,CA, pp. 774.
[18] Shapiro, R., (1986) Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, Summit Books:New York,NY, pp. 86.
[19] Swee-Eng, A., “The Origin of Life; a Critique of Current Scientific Models,” creation.com
[20] Gitt, W., “Dazzling Design in Miniture: DNA Information Storage,” creation.com
[21] Parker, G., (January 1994) “The Origin of Life: DNA and Protein,” http://www.answersingenesis.org
[22] Gitt, W., (2006) In The Beginning Was Information, Master Books:Green Forest,AR.
[23] Lester, L. & Bohlin, R., (1989) The Natural Limits To Biological Change, Probe Books:Dallas,TX, pp. 157.
[24] Meyer, S., (2009) Signature in the Cell, Harper Collins:New York,NY, pp. 347
[25] Parker, G., (January 1994) “The Origin of Life: DNA and Protein,” http://www.answersingenesis.org
[26] Wald, G., (1954) “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, 191 no. 2:48.
[27] Ross, H., (1994) The Creator and the Cosmos, Navpress:Colorado Springs,CO, pp. 137.
[28] Ross, H., (1994) The Creator and the Cosmos, Navpress:Colorado Springs,CO, pp. 138.
[29] Mullan, D., “Probabilities of Randomly Assembling a Primitive Cell on Earth,” http://www.iscid.org
[30] Duve, C., (September-October 1995) “The Beginnings of Life on Earth,” American Scientist, pp. 428.
[31] Truman, R., (December 2001) “The Fish in the Bathtub,” Creation
[32] Sarfati, J., “15 Loopholes in the Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Life,” creation.com
[33] Morris, J.D., “How Did Life Originate?” http://www.icr.org
[34] Crick, F., (October 1981) “The Seeds of Life,” Discover Magazine
[35] Grigg, R., (September 2000) “Did Life Come to Earth From Outerspace?” Creation, 22:(4), pp. 42
[36] Ross, H., (1994) The Creator and the Cosmos, Navpress:Colorado Springs,CO, pp. 138-139.
[37] Parker, G., (January 1994) “The Origin of Life: DNA and Protein,” http://www.answersingenesis.org
[38] As quoted in Paul E. Little’s Know Why You Believe, 4th Ed., InterVarsity Press:Downers Grove,IL, pp. 26.
[39] Williams, A., (August 2007) “Life’s Irreducible Structure- Part 1: Autopoiesis,” Journal of Creation, 21:(2) pp. 115.
[40] Shapiro, R. (1986) Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, Summit Books:New York,NY, pp. 128.
[41] Ross, H., (1994) The Creator and the Cosmos, Navpress:Colorado Springs,CO, pp. 141.
[42] Hart, M. H. (1990) “Atmospheric Evolution, the Drake Equation, and DNA: Sparse Life in an Infinite Universe,”Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, MacMillan:New York,NY, pp. 264.
[43] Little, P.E., (2000) Know Why You Believe, 4th Ed.,InterVarsity Press:Downers Grove,IL, pp. 26.
[44] Mullan, D., “Probabilities of Randomly Assembling a Primitive Cell on Earth,” http://www.iscid.org
[45] Thaxton, C., Bradley, W., & Olsen, R., (1984) The Mystery of Life’s Origins: Reassessing Current Theories,Philosophical Library:New York,NY, pp. 80.
[46] Sarfati, J., “15 Loopholes in the Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Life,” creation.com
[47] Lewis, R., (2008) Human Genetics; Concepts and Applications, 8th Ed., McGraw Hill:New York,NY, Pp. 30-31.
[48] Lewis, R., (2008) Human Genetics; Concepts and Applications, 8th Ed., McGraw Hill:New York,NY, Pp. 355.
[49] Mullan, D., “Probabilities of Randomly Assembling a Primitive Cell on Earth,” http://www.iscid.org
[50] Ross, H., (1994) The Creator and the Cosmos, Navpress:Colorado Springs,CO, pp. 142.
[51] Joyce, G.F.,  (1989) “RNA Evolution and the Origins of Life,” Nature 338: pp. 222-223
[52] Wells, J., (2000) Icons of Evolution, Regnery Publishing:WashingtonD.C., pp. 24.
[53] Luskin, C., (February 2012) “More News Sources Admit the ‘Mystery’ of Life’s Origin,”http://www.evolutionnews.org
[54] Hoyle, F., (1983) The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph:London, pp. 251.
[55] Yockey, H.P., (1992) Information Theory and Molecular Biology, CambridgeUniversity Press:UK, pp. 257.
[56] Yockey, H.P., (1992) Information Theory and Molecular Biology, CambridgeUniversity Press:UK, pp. 336.
[57] Swee-Eng, A., “The Origin of Life; a Critique of Current Scientific Models,” creation.com
[58] Denton, M., (1986) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,3rd Ed., Alder & Alder, pp. 341.
[59] Lipson, H. S., (May 1980) “A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, pp. 138.
[60] Parker, G., (January 1994) “The Origin of Life: DNA and Protein,” http://www.answersingenesis.org
[61] Demick, D., (December 2000) “Life From Non-Life… or Not?” Creation 23:1 pp. 41.
[62] Grigg, R., (December 1990) “Could Monkeys Type the 23rd Psalm?” Creation 13:1 pp. 34


1) https://matthew2262.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/first-life



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Bernd Rosslenbroich, On the Origin of Autonomy page 43
The essential aspect of the theory presented here is that at some time and somehow life established biochemical functions that were not identical with the processes of the surrounding inorganic environment.
An essential part of early evolution must have been the origin of a system that carries and replicates information. Again, not much is known about the first principles of the biological storage of information. The essential characteristic of life is not so much the interacting matter but the information about how to use it to establish new islands of life. Information is immaterial, but it needs a material medium. Information is the source for building a higher degree of order than exists within the environment, as long as life functions are maintained. 
DNA repair systems contribute to the stabilization of the genome. They are present already from the prokaryotes on and eliminate mistakes in the genetic code with high efficacy. For example, the permanently working repair systems eliminate mistakes that result just from thermic fluctuations. Thus, every day about 5,000 purine bases from the DNA of each human cell are lost as their bondings to deoxyribose are hydrolyzed (depurination). In addition, spontaneous deaminations from cytosine to uracil occur through interactions with metabolic products and environmental influences (chemicals, light). The genetic autonomy must constantly be defended against destructive influences. In particular, the principle of the double helix enables repair because two copies of the information are available. One copy can be used as the backup copy to repair the other copy. Therefore, the principle of the double helix contributes to the independence and stability of the genome. 
If there was a prebiotic environment with some interaction of organic molecules as forerunners of the first cells, as some hypotheses assume, at some time a closed membrane must have appeared to form the principle of the cell. It must have enclosed a compartment for the concentration of biochemical molecules and their reactions. The encapsulation of such protoplasm in membranes is an essential question for any considerations about early evolution. If metabolic networks were somehow included in some sort of capsule, there would have been problems of permeation. Capsules or vesicles would have the effect of transferring the metabolic networks without a transition from an existence within a totally open surrounding into a completely sealed situation, which would bring these networks to a standstill. The question is how the remarkable balance between a relative separation from the environment and an intensive, but regulated, exchange of substances and energy evolved. emerged Modern cells solve this problem through a combination of the lipid bilayer with integrated membrane proteins. Not only is the transport through the membrane is regulated actively, partly through the consumption of energy, but also the properties of the lipid bilayer itself are regulated. Some authors postulate that from the beginning some sort of a protocell must have been involved.

https://www.nap.edu/read/11919/chapter/7

RNA, The Origin Of Life And The Gullibility Of The Science Media
There is a pdf of the book available on the internet with full color illustrations!
Yuri I Wolf and Eugene V Koonin (2007) On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization, Biol Direct. 2007; 2: 14. Free access. Here the authors show that what I call ‘the Koonin threshold’ is based on the Eigen threshold. There is no mentioning of the 1,800 threshold, but there is a qualitative statement: “Indeed, we are unaware of translation being possible without the involvement of ribosomes, the complete sets of tRNA and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), and (at least, for translation to occur at a reasonable rate and accuracy) several translation factors”. They also discuss ID, irreducible complexity.
Eugene V Koonin (2007) The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life, Biol Direct. 2007; 2: 15. (This is essentially Appendix B of the book.)
“The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty,” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth.” (Koonin, p. 391). 
This text has been quoted by the uncommon descent intelligent design blog (Nov 13, 2011). The fact that the ID community is happy quoting Koonin without specifying a detailed ID alternative, demonstrates they are not interested in science, but only in attacking and ridiculing science. Why don’t IDists want to know how the designer did it?
All this is not to suggest that OORT [origins of replication and translation] is a problem of “irreducible complexity” and that the systems of replication and translation could not emerge by means of biological evolution. It remains possible that a compelling evolutionary scenario is eventually developed and, perhaps, validated experimentally. However, it is clear that OORT is not just the hardest problem in all of evolutionary biology but one that is qualitatively distinct from the rest. For all other problems, the basis of biological evolution, genome replication, is in place but, in the case of OORT, the emergence of this mechanism itself is the explanandum. Thus, it is of interest to consider radically different scenarios for OORT…
The MWO [“many worlds in one” – VJT] version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation could suggest a way out of this conundrum because, in an infinite multiverse with a finite number of distinct macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times), emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not just possible but inevitable.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/rna-the-origin-of-life-and-the-gullibility-of-the-science-media/#Note2

The Origin of Life
Scientists today will still admit that they really don’t know how life began on our planet. Laboratory work is tricky, and nobody was present to witness events at first hand on the primitive Earth. Researchers in abiogenesis can only invent some reasonable story about how life arose, and then maximize its plausibility by theoretical and experimental investigations.20
The second central theme of xenobiology, to which we shall return in later chapters, is the likelihood that life, once having emerged in a planetary environment, will constitute a form of biota more or less similar to that found on Earth. The laws of biochemistry demand that molecules combine only in certain specific ways, and usually only in a very few most probable ways. In other words, what are the physical and biochemical limits of the possible?
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/xenology/07.0.htm

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 best explanation of their setup and origins.

Evolution is not a driving force prior dna replication: Heredity is guaranteed by faithful DNA replication whereas evolution depends upon errors accompanying DNA replication. ( Furusawa, 1998 ) We hypothesize that the origin of life, that is, the origin of the first cell, cannot be explained by natural selection among self-replicating molecules, as is done by the RNA-world hypothesis. ( Vaneechoutte M )
DNA replication had therefore to be previously, before life began, fully setup , working, and fully operating, in order for evolution to act upon the resulting mutations. That means, evolution was not a driving force and acting for the emergence and origin of the first living organisms. The only remaining possible mechanisms are chemical reactions acting upon unregulated, aleatorial events ( luck,chance), or physical necessity ( where chemical reactions are forced into taking a certain course of action. ) Since nucleotides can be arranged freely into any informational sequence, physical necessity could not be a driving mechanism. If design, or physical necessity is discarded, the only remaining possible mechanism for the origin of life is chance/luck.

all life is dependent on replication and translation systems. These systems are fiendishly complex. 1 As Koonin puts it:

"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."

Dr. Koonin claims that the emergence of even a basic replication-translation system on the primordial Earth is such an astronomically unlikely event that we would need to postulate a vast number of universes, in which all possible scenarios are played out, in order to make its emergence likely.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/hoyles-fallacy-i-think-not/

Aw Swee-Eng: The origin of life: a critique of current scientific models 
https://creation.com/origin-of-life-critique
Key points:
How deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence integrity could have been maintained in the absence of the many enzymes which continually scan and replace missing, incorrect and damaged nucleotides has not been satisfactorily explained.
The amount of DNA in species does not correlate consistently with organism complexity.
Exon shuffling creates problems in molecular phylogeny.
The numerous components involved in RNA splicing must have all appeared simultaneously to be advantageous because a partially complete mechanism would function detrimentally.
Introns introduced into a prokaryotic cell’s genes would have no opportunity to be removed before protein is made, resulting in “nonsense” nonfunctional proteins.
The weaving of information coding for one polypeptide into an existing nucleotide sequence coding for another imposes severe evolutionary constraints.
The universality of the genetic code—a strong argument that all organisms are derived from a single ancestor—in fact has many exceptions.• Intron sequences correlate over remarkable ranges of thousands of base pairs, strongly suggesting they are functional.
It has not been explained how proteins could have managed to fold correctly in the absence of chaperones—themselves complex proteins.
In hypotheses involving the incorporation of a prokaryote to account for organelles such as mitochondria, it is not clear how a stable relationship between anaerobic invaders and an aerobic or aerotolerant host was possible or why some genes and not others should be transferred to the host’s nucleus.
Current attempts to root the phylogenetic tree of life are based on relatively simple and therefore unrealistic models of evolution.
Accidental assembly of a self-replicating molecule now has so many qualifications that its scientific integrity is questionable.

M Vaneechoutte: The scientific origin of life. Considerations on the evolution of information, leading to an alternative proposal for explaining the origin of the cell, a semantically closed system 2000
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).1
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10818565

1.  In Miller’s experiment he was careful to make sure there was no oxygen present. If oxygen was present, then the amino acids would not form. However, if oxygen was absent from the earth, then there would be no ozone layer, and if there was no ozone layer the ultraviolet radiation would penetrate the atmosphere and would destroy the amino acids as soon as they were formed. So the dilemma can be summed up this way: amino acids would not form in an atmosphere with oxygen and amino acids would be destroyed in an atmosphere without oxygen.
2. The next problem concerns the so-called handedness of the amino acids. Because of the way that carbon atoms join up with other atoms, amino acids exist in two forms—the right-handed form and the left-handed form. Just as your right hand and left hand are identical in all respects except for their handedness, so the two forms of amino acids are identical except for their handedness. In all living systems only left-handed amino acids are found. Yet Miller’s experiment produced a mixture of right-handed and left-handed amino acids in identical proportions. As only the left-handed ones are used in living systems, this mixture is useless for the evolution of living systems.
3. Another major problem for the chemical evolutionist is the origin of the information that is found in living systems. There are various claims about the amount of information that is found in the human genome, but it can be conservatively estimated as being equivalent to a few thousand books, each several hundred pages long. Where did this information come from?
4. If the many instructions that direct an animal’s or plant’s immune system had not been preprogrammed in the organism’s genetic system when it first appeared on earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have killed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense.a Obviously, for each organism to have survived, all this information must have been there from the beginning.  
5.The sugar found in the backbone of both DNA and RNA, ribose, has been particularly problematic, as the most prebiotically plausible chemical reaction schemes have typically yielded only a small amount of ribose mixed with a diverse assortment of other sugar molecules.
6. all the peptide links to form a proptein must be alpha-peptide bonds, not some mix of alpha and epsilon,beta, and gamma bonds
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html
"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."
7.amino acids and sugars combine and destroy each other. In lab experiments the component chemicals are neatly separated from one another. How is this possible in a primitive ocean?
8. Synthesis vs destruction - For chemical bonds to form there needs to be an external source of energy. Unfortunately, the same energy that creates the bonds is much more likely to destroy them. In the famous Miller experiment (1953) that synthesized amino acids, a cold trap is used to selectively isolate the reaction products. Without this, the would be no products. This poses a challenge to simplistic early earth schemes where lightning simply strikes a primitive ocean. Where is the "trap" in such an ocean? Also, the creation of amino acids by a chemist in a laboratory is still much different from forming self-replicating life.
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com.br/2013/03/here-is-why-dna-code-is-problem.html

Origin of Life Made Easy 
As anyone knows who has been given directions and told “you can’t miss it,” sounding easy and being easy can be entirely different things.  Reporters sometimes make the most difficult step in evolution – the origin of life – look like a cinch through the use of suggestive metaphors, like the commonly-invoked phrase, “building blocks of life.”  The directions in their articles usually lead to dead ends at worst, or, at best, baby steps on a long march, most of the route , a (three letter acronym) meaning “to be determined.”
Tool kit:  This metaphor was presented by PhysOrg in an article entitled, “Meteorites: Tool kits for creating life on Earth.”  The main idea was that nucleobases could have been formed in meteorites and come to earth special delivery.  (Science Daily and New Scientist identified these nucleobases as adenine and guanine.)  “The earliest forms of life on Earth may have been assembled from materials delivered to Earth by meteorites,” PhysOrg said.  Jim Cleaves (Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory) added, “This shows us that meteorites may have been molecular tool kits, which provided the essential building blocks for life on Earth.”
Plausible precursor:  This metaphor was offered by Science Daily, “Study Builds On Plausible Scenario for Origin of Life On Earth.”  The study, conducted at Scripps, attempted to find precursors to .  The article repeatedly spoke of precursors, not itself, which depends on the difficult-to-synthesize sugar ribose (“Did borax evolve into 20-mule teams?”, 01/09/2004).  What these precursors are was not identified, but the very word precursor uses the power of suggestion to invoke images of progress.
Evolutionary force driving simple to complex:  “Is this how simple life got complicated?” an article PhysOrg teased.  Within the article, Andrew Murray invoked the image of an “evolutionary force” that led single cells to leap to multicellular life forms.  But what he studied was how living yeast cells seem to do better in clumps than individually.  Yeast cells already have the cellular machinery that challenges theories of the origin of life.
These analogies vastly oversimplify what goes on in living cells.  For instance, this article on Science Daily used the word machine and machinery 16 times, describing how is acted on by protein machines that provide quality control during cell division.  Without cell division, evolution cannot act, because it needs to naturally select copies, or offspring.

Dr. Robert Shapiro knows that a living cell is anything but simple.  He has said that the leap from simple molecules to a cell is greater than the distance between a bacterium and an elephant (cited on aish.com).  In Nature last week (August 4),1 he reviewed David Deamer’s new book First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began (University of California Press, 2011).  Shapiro criticized Deamer’s hypothesis that life began in droplets surrounded by fatty acids.  In fact, all simplistic scenarios overlook the complexity of life as we know it:
Today, the simplest living cells depend on molecules that are far more intricate than those that have been isolated from sources unrelated to life (abiotic), such as meteorites. The most noteworthy chemical substances in life are functioning polymers — large molecules made of smaller units called monomers, connected in a specific order. The nucleic acids and , carriers of genetic information and heredity, are made of connected nucleotide monomers. Similarly, proteins are vital polymer catalysts that are made by combining monomer amino acids. Such modern biological constructions were unlikely to have been present on the early Earth.
As an example, Shapiro noted that the World hypothesis, while elegantly simple, is “staggeringly improbable.”  It is doubtful he would be impressed by the presence of nucleobases in a meteorite:
Nucleotides, for example, are not encountered in nature beyond organisms or laboratory synthesis. To construct , high concentrations of four select nucleotides would be needed in the same location, with others being excluded. If this is the prerequisite for life, then it is an unusual phenomenon, rare in the Universe.

Deamer’s dream of a fatty vesicle as a container for the world, Shapiro continued, fails for the same reason: “Unfortunately, his theory retains the improbable generation of self-replicating polymers such as .”  In fact, Shapiro added, “Deamer’s insight deflates the synthetic proofs put forward in numerous papers supporting the world.”  Using that unfortunate word Unfortunately once again, though, he undermined Deamer’s “insight” into spontaneous vesicle formation as essentially useless:
Unfortunately, the chemicals that he suggests for inclusion are drawn from modern biology, not from ancient geochemistry. We should let nature inform us, rather than pasting our ideas onto her.
Incidentally, Nature News said that the scientific community has largely dismissed last year’s claim that arsenic-based life was possible (see “Arsenic and Old Lake,” 12/02/2010).  Rosie Redfield (U of British Columbia) is trying to replicate the experiment by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, even though it is almost “guaranteed to fail,” according to Erika Check Hayden.  Her article, though, focused more on how blog reporting of attempts to replicate controversial experiments is changing the face of peer review.  Said Jonathan Eisen (U of California), “This is a great case study for open science, because it raises issues about peer review, it raises issues about sharing data and materials, and it raises issues about engaging the public and press more actively in science.”  The Facebook-Twitter age is opening doors of science labs, where both good and bad can be seen in near real time.
1. Robert Shapiro, “Astrobiology: Life’s beginnings,” Nature 476 (04 August 2011), pages 30–31, doi:10.1038/476030a.

David Klinghoffer has a better metaphor for these origin-of-life stories.  Saying that molecular “building blocks of life” can form naturally is like explaining Bach’s music by saying natural sources for the ink are readily available (see Evolution News).
One of the best recent collections of quotes on how “staggeringly improbable” the origin of life is, as understood by workers in the field, can be found in Rabbi Moshe Averick’s book Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist (Tradition and Reason Press, 2010).  In Part , Averick quotes Shapiro and many other leaders in origin-of-life studies, making it abundantly clear from their own writings that evolutionists are completely clueless about how life started.  For instance, on pages 94–95, he quotes five leading astrobiologists admitting that the origin of life seems like a miracle.
Those quotes should be kept at hand when reading science news articles with their glittering generalities making it sound like the origin of life is easy as apple pie.  Evolutionists need to make apple pie without first assuming apples.  In fact, as Carl Sagan said in Cosmos, to really make an apple pie from scratch, you must begin by inventing the universe.  Good luck—when all you have to start with is nothing (08/09/2011).
http://crev.info/2011/08/110813-origin_of_life_made_easy/

The most complex factory made by humans, and comparison to the most simple living cell

If we consider as the most complex machine ever built by man, and take as parameter :

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-complex-machine-ever-built-by-mankind

the number of individual components comprising the machine, the highly specialized materials out of which they are constructed, the minute engineering tolerances involved in their production and assembly, the exquisite precision required in the synchronization of their operation, the physical scale of the assembled machine, the complexity and delicacy of the task the machine is designed to perform,

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 far more complex. This lead Michael Denton to write in  Evolution: A Theory In Crisis :

“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 (Denton, 1986, p. 250).

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. Thats a classic example of " evolution of the gaps ". We don't know yet, therefore evolution.

Evolution is however not a driving force prior dna replication, upon which it depends.

Heredity is guaranteed by faithful DNA replication whereas evolution depends upon errors accompanying DNA replication.  ( Furusawa, 1998 ) We hypothesize that the origin of life, that is, the origin of the first cell, cannot be explained by natural selection among self-replicating molecules, as is done by the RNA-world hypothesis. ( Vaneechoutte M )
DNA replication had therefore to be previously, before life began, fully setup , working, and fully operating, in order for evolution to act upon the resulting mutations. That means, evolution was not a driving force and acting for the emergence and origin of the first living organisms. The only remaining possible mechanisms are chemical reactions acting upon unregulated, aleatorial events ( luck,chance), or physical necessity ( where chemical reactions are  forced into taking a certain course of action. ) Since nucleotides can be arranged freely into any informational sequence, physical necessity could not be a driving mechanism. If design, or physical necessity is discarded, the only remaining possible mechanism for the origin of life is chance/luck.

Would you also say that it is plausible that a tornado over a junkyard could produce a 747 ?
Would you also say that it is plausible that mindless random chance can write a book ?

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, hudge 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 hability 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 its needed,  cleans up waste and has waste bins and sophisticated recycle  mechanisms, storage departments, produces its energy and shuttles it to where its needed, and last not least, does reproduce itself.

The salient thing is that the individual parts and compartments have no function by their own. They had to emerge ALL AT ONCE, No stepwise manner is possible, all systems are INTERDEPENDENT and IRREDUCIBLE. And it could not be through evolution, since evolution depends on fully working self replicating  cells, in order to function.

How can someone rationally argue that the origin of the most sophisticated factory in the universe would be probable to be based on natural occurence, without involving any guiding intelligence ?

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


Paul Nelson: We can call the lysed bacterium thought experiment “the Humpty Dumpty (HD) experiment.” The HD experiment has been described many times in the scientific literature, although to my knowledge it has never actually been performed, because everyone (except perhaps OOL researcher Jan Spitzer) knows what would happen. Nothing, except the irreversible chemical degradation of the cellular contents. Here’s a 2011 description of the HD experiment, from OOL researcher William Martin:

“The proposal that life arose through the self-organisation of preformed constituents in a pond or an ice-pore containing some kind of preformed prebiotic broth can be rejected with a simple thought experiment: If we were to take a living organism and homogenize it so as to destroy the cellular structure but leave the molecules intact, then put that perfect organic soup into a container and wait for any amount of time, would any form of life ever arise from it de novo? The answer is no…”

(William Martin 2011, pdf here: http://www.biologydirect.com/content/6/1/36)

From this – i.e., STARTING with the HD thought experiment – Martin draws important lessons. The origin of the living state isn’t simply a matter of pulling together the right molecules, into the same microenvironment, because the HD experiment shows that even having all the right molecules, cheek by jowl, will yield nothing.

Rather, Martin concludes that:

1. Life cannot begin without compartments, required for energy gradients.
2. Life cannot emerge against the laws of thermodynamics, which means “harnessable chemical energy” must be “available naturally, all the time.”

Martin thinks that submarine alkaline vents provide a promising setting to give (1) and (2). Okay – but is that the only lesson of the HD experiment? Of course not. In real cells, what maintains the configurational specificity of proteins, a function known to be required for viability? Satisfying energetic demands (1) and (2) doesn’t solve that problem, nor does it solve the information storage and replication requirements known to be necessary for the living state. And so on. The HD experiment focuses one’s attention on the jointly necessary conditions required for the living state, and how the loss of any one of them – in this case, cell wall or cell membrane integrity – instantly compromises ALL of the others. To be sure, dynamiting a suspension bridge is not the reverse process of building the same bridge. But bridges are constructed, painstakingly, by engineers, with the distant target carefully in sight, precisely because that target state is very hard to hit, and easy to lose. To paraphrase Dawkins, there are infinitely many more ways for iron, asphalt, wire, piping, and concrete NOT to be a suspension bridge than vice versa. The parallel to the origin of life, and the relevance of the HD experiment, I leave to you, Larry, as a homework assignment.
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com.br/2015/10/intelligent-design-needs-to-clean-up.html?showComment=1445876724433#c6959273916679981483

Fighter Planes and Eukaryotic Cells
The F-22 fighter plane is a highly-sophisticated state of the art military aircraft. It is comprised of thousands of complex parts that all work together to enable the plane to perform a multitude of functions. Individually, these parts cannot operate or fly. But collectively they can fly and execute many different functions. Now let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s imagine the entire earth is covered in huge piles of mechanical parts, thousands and thousands of miles of nothing but pieces of metal, plastic, rubber, etc. Now let’s imagine there are thousands of tornados and hurricanes all over the earth blowing all these parts around and into each other 24-7. Now with all this in mind, do you think it is possible that over the course of thousands or millions or even billions of years, that one of these storms would blow together an F-22 fighter plane in perfect operational condition? Seems ridiculous right? Given an infinite amount of time, something like this just could not happen…Now let’s look at the typical human eukaryotic cell. It too, just like the F22, is incredibly sophisticated and complex, but at a much smaller microscopic scale. This cell is also comprised of thousands of working parts (called organelles) that all work together to enable the cell to provide a multitude of functions. Individually, these parts are useless, but collectively they’re necessary. Remove anyone of these important parts and the cell will lose functionality and parish. So if it is ridiculous to think that a perfectly operational F-22 fighter plane could come into existence via chance, then it is likewise just as illogical to think that such a sophisticated organism could assemble by chance as well. It gets even more absurd to think that this living cell would also form by chance and have the capability to reproduce. Life cannot come from non-life even if given infinite time and chance. If life could spontaneously generate from non-life than it still should be doing that to this day. However, we’ve never observed it… Hence the Law of Biogenesis: The principle stating that life arises from pre-existing life, not from non-living material. Life is clearly a product of God’s Creation.


Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Fe68da10



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Catch22 Origin of Life problems - check mate for Abiogenesis

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.

This is very true. But we can go a step further:
To go from the existence of the basic building blocks on early earth to Cell assembly of complex carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, metals and seven non-metal elements from monomers is less of a step than to go from the existence of these small organic molecules synthesized in Cells to a fully working self-replicating Cell. This might be surprising, but not when someone knows the efforts taken by cells to synthesize these building blocks, which is truly remarkable.

One of the most dramatic evidence why abiogenesis fails is the fact that to make these basic building blocks of life, the cell machinery which is made upon these very basic building blocks must be fully set up and operating. That creates a catch22 situation:

It takes Proteins to make the basic building blocks of life. But it takes the basic building blocks of life to make proteins.
It takes ATP to make proteins. But it takes proteins to make ATP.
It takes proteins to make amino acids. But it takes amino acids to make proteins
It takes DNA to make proteins. But it takes proteins to make DNA.
Cell duplication and DNA replication is essential for the survival and perpetuation of all living things. It takes over 30 specialized irreducible proteins for DNA replication. But it takes the DNA to RNA transcription and RNA translation to make proteins. What came first?
It takes proteins to make the error-check and correction proteins that reduce the DNA replication error rate 10.000.000.000 times. These error check and correction proteins had to be checked too. How did the process start?
But it takes the DNA transcription and translation to make proteins. What came first?
It takes a fully setup signalling network for cells to adapt to ecological variations, like heat-shock proteins to adapt to climate variation and temperatures. How did that system start, if it is non-functional, if not fully setup?
It takes fully synthesized Fe/S ( Iron sulphur) clusters for a majority of proteins used in oxidation-reduction reactions, essential for all life forms. But it takes complex uptake and synthesis processes to make these metal clusters through veritable nano-molecular non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) assembly lines for iron uptake. What came first: These manufacturing assembly lines, or the proteins that make them?
The central metabolic pathways like glycolysis or the Citric Acid cycle are essential to make Adenine triphosphate ( ATP ),  the energy currency in the cell, and amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins. These metabolic pathways use enzymes, which are made through ATP and amino acids. How did these pathways emerge?
It takes DNA and proteins to make phospholipids for Cell membranes. But the Cell membrane must be fully setup and permit a closed, protected environment, for the very own processes to operate that synthesize Cell membranes.
The Lipid membrane would be useless without membrane proteins but how could membrane proteins have emerged in the absence of functional membranes?

Carbohydrates are metabolized to provide energy and are stored in muscle and liver as glycogen. Six-carbon glucose molecules are degraded by a series of chemical reactions to three-carbon pyruvate by the reactions of glycolysis; pyruvate.  The core structure of the metabolic network is very similar across all organisms. Centrally located within this network are the sugar-phosphate reactions of glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway. Together with the overlapping reactions of the Entner–Doudoroff pathway and of the Calvin cycle, they provide the precursor metabolites required for the synthesis of RNA, DNA, lipids, energy and redox coenzymes and amino acids—key molecules required for life.

Cells use hierarchical levels of organization, where the function and proper set up of the higher level depend on the lower level. And that lower level, as shown above, depends on irreducible biochemical synthesis processes. That is an all or nothing business, which could not be setup if not by intelligent setup. 




Thanks to experiments with snake meat, Francesco Redi realized 350 years ago: All life comes from an egg!
Francesco "Baltazar"Redi (18 February 1626 – 1 March 1697) was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology" 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Redi

Biology A Self-Teaching Guide Second Edition, page 19
Are there any animals that spontaneously develop from mud or sand? The idea of such "generation" was in circulation since Aristotle until Francesco Redi refuted it 350 years ago. Redi's famous experiment in 1668, was  one of the first steps in refuting "spontaneous generation" - a theory also known as Aristotelian Abiogenesis.

Since Aristotle, it has been said that in addition to sexual and vegetative reproduction, there is a third type of reproduction. Spontaneous generation. This refers to the idea that so-called "lower" animals such as insects, worms, shells, crabs, amphibians - the naturalist Réaumur counted in his "Mémoires pour servir à l 'histoire des insectes" (1734-1742) even the crocodile to - arising from mud, sand or decaying cadaver ("generatio ex putrefactione"). In a letter, Redi then reported to his friend Carlo Dati about his investigations of the phenomenon and told him the result that even "lower" animals, unlike all other creatures, were created by sexual procreation. Period. And now the battle cry was: "Omnia ex ovo!" I mean, life comes out of an egg.

Francesco Redi was a member of the Accademia del Cimento. This union had written Galileo Galilei's motto "provando e riprovando" on the flag, which says: prove and prove by further experiments again. And so the researcher diversified his experiment several times to confirm the validity of his discovery by means of control and counter-experiments.

Redi's discovery spread quickly. However, the followers of the doctrine of the original generation, which was always repeated by the Fathers of the Church, were not so easily defeated. And indeed, only four years after Redi's experiments, the Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovered the infusoria, microscopic animals, in his water droplets from eaves and puddles using his light microscope. With these, the traditionalist defenders of spontaneous generation rejoiced, it would be an impossibility to observe eggs. The arguments went on for a long time, until in 1861 Louis Pasteur succeeded, through experiments with gooseneck-shaped test tubes, to prove definitively that the time-honoured idea of ​spontaneous generation had become obsolete.

This happened 200 years after Redis sensational discovery. But even the ingenious Pasteur speculated in 1878 in an unpublished note about whether the spontaneous emergence of life should not be somehow possible. After all, she could have played a role at the beginning of life on our planet. No reason from today's point of view to ridicule the supposedly authoritarian hearing traditionalists who persist despite Redis discovery on the traditional "knowledge" of a primordial generation. Or is it clearer today how organic life could have evolved four billion years ago from the primordial soup of inorganic matter? It is therefore only logical that abiogenesis ("A-Bio-Genesis"), ie spontaneous generation, has remained an important research topic in chemistry of our time.

By the late 1870s, most scientists agreed that all organisms arose from the reproduction of preexisting organisms, and the concept of spontaneous generation had become history. 




Cell morphology cannot be read out of genomic sequences alone
Molecules into Cells: Specifying Spatial Architecture 1 2005 Dec
Spatial organization is perhaps the most conspicuous quality of cells and organisms, and also the most elusive. The dissection of life into its molecular constituents—the genes, enzymes, and lipid bilayers—necessarily starts with the destruction of spatial order. Yet we know that most complex functions, such as motility and division, depend on having the right molecules in their proper placesArchitecture is what ultimately distinguishes a living cell from a soup of the chemicals of which it is composed. How cells generate, maintain, and reproduce their spatial organization is central to any understanding of the living state. 1 Organization, like other aspects of physiology and function, manifests the instructions encoded in the genes. Genes, acting individually or through elaborate regulatory networks, specify the structure of living matter and ensure its persistence; ultimately it is the genes that build cells.

If a protein deleted or altered by mutation plays a role in morphogenesis, the mutant's form or organization may well be affected. Examples from both prokaryotes and eukaryotes run into the hundreds . Such mutants are immensely valuable in dissecting morphogenetic pathways, but they do not show that cell form and organization are explicitly spelled out in the genetic instructions.

My comment: This paper was published in 2005. We know today that epigenetic mechanisms play a major role, if not a central role, in conjunction with genes, in how Cells are intracellularly organized.

Is cellular architecture explicitly spelled out by genes, and if so, how? If not, how is spatial organization passed from one generation to the next? How do molecules find the correct location in the cell space? What is the origin of large-scale order, as illustrated by the mitotic spindle or the endomembrane system of eukaryotic cells? How do multitudes of molecules reproducibly come together into cellular forms, which in turn serve as the targets of natural selection?

Targeting sequences direct proteins to the plasma membrane, nucleus, mitochondria, or lysosomes. Certain proteins and mRNAs are transported individually to particular locations in cell space, and this localization depends on having an appropriate sequence. Transport vesicles recognize specific target membranes, such as the Golgi, vacuole, or plasma membrane, with the aid of SNARE proteins. But there is much more to growth and division than manufacturing the parts. A rod-shaped cell must also elongate with constant diameter, construct an efficient apparatus to partition its chromosomes, locate its midpoint, lay down a septum, and undergo fission. In eukaryotic cells, targeted vesicle fusion requires, in addition to the SNAREs, both a delivery system and a secretory apparatusThis is all elaborate choreography. Genes specify the molecular parts, not their arrangement into a higher order.

Question: How did this targeting sequence emerge? And not only the sequence by itself but also the mechanisms of recognition of these target sequences. There has to be an information source, an encoder, a communication channel, a decoder (or receiver), and a user. The information source generates the information to be transmitted; the encoder transforms the information into a suitable message form for transmission over the communication channel; and the decoder performs the inverse operation of the encoder, or approximately so, for the user at the other end of the channel.

As Perry Marshall explains :

1. A code
2. An encoder that obeys the rules of a code
3. A message that obeys the rules of the code
4. A decoder that obeys the rules of the code

The rules of any communication system are always defined in advance by a process of deliberate choices. There must be prearranged agreement between sender and receiver, otherwise communication is impossible. By definition, a communication system cannot evolve from something simpler because evolution itself requires communication to exist first. You can’t make copies of a message without the message, and you can’t create a message without first having a language. And before that, you need intent. A code is an abstract, immaterial, nonphysical set of rules. There is no physical law that says ink on a piece of paper formed in the shape T-R-E-E should correspond to that large leafy organism in your front yard. You cannot derive the local rules of a code from the laws of physics, because hard physical laws necessarily exclude choice. On the other hand, the coder decides whether “1” means “on” or “off.” She decides whether “0” means “off” or “on.” Codes, by definition, are freely chosen. The rules of the code come before all else. These rules of any language are chosen with a goal in mind: communication, which is always driven by intent. That being said, conscious beings can evolve a simple code into a more complex code—if they can communicate in the first place. But even simple grunts and hand motions between two humans who share no language still require communication to occur. Pointing to a table and making a sound that means “table” still requires someone to recognize what your pointing finger means.

The paper continues:
For the purposes of cell biology, let me define self-organization as the emergence of supramolecular order from the interactions among numerous molecules that obey only local rules, without reference to an external template or global plan.

My comment: Does a rule not demand a ruler ?

The structure of the self-assembled complex is wholly specified by the structures of its parts and is therefore implicit in the genes that specify those parts: natural selection crafted those genes to specify parts that assemble into a functional complex.

My comment: Did you perceive the AD-HOC explanation? Natural selection? How does the author know this? He doesn't. Furthermore, there was no natural selection prior life began.

"Although the general public is disconcertingly unaware of it, it is a fact that scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process absent the intervention of a conscious creative force.
Here are just a few well-chosen statements on the Origin of Life:
- (2016) “[There is] collective cluelessness…those who say this is well worked out, they know nothing, nothing about chemical synthesis…Those who think that scientists understand the details of life’s origin are wholly uninformed. Nobody understands…when will the scientific community confess to the world that they are clueless on life’s origin, that the emperor has no clothes?” (James Tour — Professor of Chemistry, Rice University (Synthetic chemist and among the top ten most cited chemists in the world))
- (2011) “The Origin of Life field is a failure.” (Eugene Koonin, microbiologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information)
- (2011) “With respect to the Origin of Life, I find the more we learn about cells, the more complex they seem; they are just incredibly complex things, and to go from what we can see today and try to reason where it came from, I think is really impossible.” (Lee Hartwell, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2001)
- (2007) “How? [did life begin] I have no idea.” (George Whitesides, Professor of Chemistry, Harvard University, Winner of the Priestley Medal in Chemistry (second only to the Nobel Prize))
- (2001) “The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.” (Franklin Harold, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Colorado State University)
- (1983) “In short, there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on earth.” (Sir Fred Hoyle, distinguished British astronomer, physicist, mathematician (without question one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century))
- (1981) “Since Science does not have the faintest idea how life on earth originated…it would only be honest to confess this to other scientists, to grantors, and to the public at large.” (Hubert Yockey, physicist and renowned information theorist)
As Biochemist Klaus Dose wrote: “Experimentation on the origin of life…has led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution.” Researchers Carl Woese and Gunter Wachtershauser concur: “While we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.”
Why are researchers having such difficulties discovering a naturalistic Origin of Life? Let’s let the aforementioned and atheist microbiologist Eugene Koonin answer this question: “Certainly this is not due to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the Origin of Life…these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.”
Translation for the lay-person: Discovering how unguided naturalistic forces could assemble a living cell — a molecular machine that is more sophisticated and functionally complex than anything human technology has ever produced — is a problem of nightmarish proportions.
When one dispassionately contemplates the enormous difficulties involved in a naturalistic origin of life, it is not surprising at all that one often suggested solution is Intelligent Design or Divine Creation. In fact, any number of world class scientists themselves have brought up the issue:
“Abiogenesis [life from non-life] strikes many as virtually miraculous…you might get the impression from what I have written not only that the origin of life is virtually impossible, but that life itself is impossible…So what is the answer? Is life a miracle after all?” (Dr. Paul Davies)
“[We have no naturalistic explanation for] the origin of life, which is unknown so far…As long as the origin of life can’t be explained in natural terms, the hypothesis of an instant Divine creation of life cannot objectively be ruled out.” (Dr. Christian DeDuve, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1974)
“There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility.” (George Wald, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1967)
“Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about…I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.” (Dr. Werner Arber, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1978)
“From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident.” (Chandra Wickramasinghe, mathematician, astronomer, astrobiologist – longtime collaborator of Sir Fred Hoyle)
“Indeed, such a theory [Intelligent Design] is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.” “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” (Sir Fred Hoyle)
If a rational, truth-seeking individual is asked: “How did life begin; naturalistic, unguided forces or Divine Creation?” There are only two possible answers: (a) Divine Creation or (b) I don’t know, the jury is still out; but atheism – a denial of the existence of a Creator of life — is not possible anymore….unless, of course, as I stated in the title of this article, you are prepared to ignore science and scientists. And if so, you might just as well go and play children’s games and with children’s toys, like…..LEGO blocks."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1306800/

Artificial intelligence and humanoids, compared to the human body
DESIGN PRINCIPLES of a human mimetic humanoid
The fundamental concept underlying our design is to consider the human mechanism, which contrasts with the conventional engineering approach used in the design of existing humanoids. For at least the last two millennia, human beings have endeavored to understand the systems and mechanisms that make up the human body, such as the principles of muscle control, the sensory nervous system that connects the brain and the body, the mechanisms of learning in the brain, and the accomplishment of the simple act of walking.
http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/2/13/eaaq0899

Kenshiro is the most advanced Human humanoid MADE IN JAPAN. mimetic humanoid DESIGN CRITERIA were on the basis of the mechanisms in the human body. Its musculoskeletal systems are as close as possible to that of a human.  The researchers in Japan have been refining robotic parts to mimic human parts and assembling them to make whole robots that move as closely as possible to the ways humans move.
https://techxplore.com/news/2017-12-team-japan-advanced-humanoid-robot.html

“These robots are inherently cross-disciplinary, involving advanced locomotion and manipulation, biomechanics, artificial intelligence, machine vision, perception, learning and cognitive development, as well as behavioral studies.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/20/human-like-robots-yet-able-play-badminton-perform-sit-ups-blessed/

2017 PAL Robotics launches TALOS, a fully electrical humanoid robot with joint torque sensors and EtherCAT communication technology that can manipulate up to 6Kg payload in each of its grippers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid_robot

SMARTLY DESIGNED Carefully crafted
http://blog.pal-robotics.com/talos-robot-the-new-humanoid-from-pal-robotics/

It took humanity two thousand years, and the best minds to conceptualize and develop human like robots, which are despite all the intelligence employed to create them, far from close to the complexity and perfection of the human body.

The human body:
When we arrive on this earth we are endowed with the most perfect, the most efficient, and the best constructed machine ever devised – our body. A machine beautifully engineered and constructed with the best materials with no planned obsolescence. Constructed with material of superb quality destined with proper use to last long periods of time.

The body's computer, the brain, is by far the most sophisticated, the finest constructed, the most efficient computer that has ever been or ever will be designed. No man-made computer can approach the efficiency of the computer each of us has.

- 37,2 trillion Cells
- each Cell hosts 2,3 billion molecular machines ( proteins )
The  human brain: 86 billion neurons
The bit capacity of the human brain:  10^8,342 bits , exceeds the bit capacity of the entire universe at 10^120 bits
the storage capacity of one human brain is equivalent to 10^8,419 modern computers
the human brain’s memory capacity:  1,000 terabytes (for comparison, the 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represents about 10 terabytes of data)

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2697-topics-on-the-structural-complexity-of-the-human-body?highlight=human

No intelligence required to make it ?


Organic vs non-organic
If you see blueprint with precise instructions how to build a factory, including all machines, production lines, energy generator, computers etc.:  Would you intuitively and immediately recognize that someone very intelligent elaborated the blueprint upon knowledge, information, intuition, inventive power, experience, and reason?  Or would you consider that ink randomly was thrown on a piece of paper, and somehow, the ink formed letters, lines, graphics, instructions, tables, etc. ? Even the most basic biological cell maintaining the most basic functions of life requires far more complex information to make the simplest Cell than man-made machines.  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 in 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 kilometres 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 thousand 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....

Sohan Jheeta:The Routes of Emergence of Life from LUCA during the RNA and Viral World: A Conspectus 2015 Jun; 5
Understanding the processes of life’s origin is mind-bogglingly complex. To date, we have not even dented the metaphoric surface of the mysteries of the origin of life; for example, we are still grappling with the question of which came first, metabolism, genetics or vesicles? How else could the details of life’s origins be unearthed?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500147/

Paul Davies:
"We propose that the transition from non-life to life is unique and definable," added Davies. "We suggest that life may be characterized by its distinctive and active use of information, thus providing a roadmap to identify rigorous criteria for the emergence of life. This is in sharp contrast to a century of thought in which the transition to life has been cast as a problem of chemistry, with the goal of identifying a plausible reaction pathway from chemical mixtures to a living entity."
In a nutshell, the authors shift attention from the "hardware" – the chemical basis of life – to the "software" – its information content. To use a computer analogy, chemistry explains the material substance of the machine, but it won't function without a program and data. Davies and Walker suggest that the crucial distinction between non-life and life is the way that living organisms manage the information flowing through the system.
"When we describe biological processes we typically use informational narratives – cells send out signals, developmental programs are run, coded instructions are read, genomic data are transmitted between generations and so forth," Walker said. "So identifying life's origin in the way information is processed and managed can open up new avenues for research."
Paul Davies, an ASU Regents' Professor and director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Sara Walker, a NASA post-doctoral fellow at the Beyond Center.
What Davies missed to point out, is, that this information input could have come only from an intelligent designer.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/10/radical-theory-says-transition-from-inorganic-to-organic-life-was-based-on-information-not-chemistry.html

Dr. John F. Ashton, PhD: Evolution Impossible  page 41
For the first life to start from nonliving matter, thousands of specialized large complex molecules must somehow be synthesized in very large numbers from simple small inorganic molecules. These molecules then have to come together randomly over and over again until somehow the structure of the cell is formed. This remarkable and complex structure would still, however, not be alive. To become alive, hundreds of metabolic reactions would have to be initiated, with the metabolic intermediates already in place at just the right concentrations so that the reactions went the right way. Common sense tells us that these sorts of reactions just don’t happen by chance — in fact, we cannot even make them happen. To make the complex cell machine start up, we  have to change the concentration of hundreds of the metabolic intermediates back to just the right concentrations simultaneously. That is, we have to reinstate steady state nonequilibrium where the rate at which metabolites are formed is balanced perfectly with the rate they are required to be used by the next process. We know what to do, but even with our best technology we cannot achieve this — it is impossible. Once even a simple organism is dead it cannot be made alive again. This is a straightforward scientific observation. Evolution, however, requires not only the equivalent of a dead organism being made alive, but that the organism and its complex components and information systems must form in the first place by random processes. Then it must quickly be made alive before it has a chance to decompose or be damaged by other chemicals. Thus, the proponents of chemical evolution have to show that under the conditions that supposedly existed in a hypothetical primordial earth:

1. biomonomers (basic building block molecules) could form
2. biopolymers could form from these biomonomers
3. connected metabolic pathways could form
4. a live cell forms where chemical reactions are taking place in steady state ( i.e., perfectly balanced) nonequilibrium

To date, scientists have been able to replicate in the laboratory most of the reactions required for step 1. However, scientists have run into major problems trying to perform step 2. Small biopolymers only a fraction of the size required have been produced under ideal conditions using chemically reactive versions of nucleotides. These small, random molecules are a long, long way from the giant information encoded molecules required for life . The genetic information problem also has not been addressed in these experiments. Step 2 requires not only formation of biopolymers but also information to be encoded into these molecules to prepare for step 3. The evolutionary model requires this encoded information to occur as a result of nondirected random processes.

Dembski has shown mathematically that chance can be eliminated as a plausible explanation for a specified system when it exceeds the available probabilistic resources.  For the known universe, this is calculated
to be one chance in ten to the power 150, i.e., 10^150. The latter number is a 1 followed by 150 zeros. (Note 1 billion is 10^9, i.e., 1 followed by 9 zeros or 1,000,000,000.)

Consider the probability of a short, specifically coded protein molecule 100 amino acids in length arising by chance from its amino acid building blocks. To make the protein chain, all the amino acids must form a specific type of chemical bond known as a peptide bond with each other. However, other non-peptide bonds are possible and occur with approximately equal probability. This means that at any given site along the growing chain, the probability of having a peptide bond is one in two or ½. Therefore, the probability of having four peptide bonds in a four-link chain is ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ = (½)4 = 1/16 or 1 chance in 16. The probability of building a 100 amino acid chain with only peptide bonds is (½)99, which calculates to be around 1 chance in 10^30.

the chance of getting 100 L-amino acids forming a chain with only peptide bonds is now roughly one chance in 10^60 attempts

The probability of getting the right amino acid in the right site is 1 chance out of 20 possibilities. Therefore, the probability of forming a particular protein 100 amino acids long by chance would be (1/20)100, which is around 1 chance in 10^130.

A typical biological protein consists of about 300 amino acid units, and some are much longer. Biochemists at Cambridge University and MIT have published more detailed calculations of the probability of a functional sequence of amino acids arising by chance, and have come up with probabilities equivalent to finding a particular single atom in the universe!

From studies of single-celled organisms, scientists have estimated that the simplest possible living organism would require a genome containing a minimum of 250 to 400 genes. Thus, the improbability of life occurring in the simplest cells with the corresponding molecular complexity vastly exceeds 1 chance in 10^150. In other words, abiogenesis is absolutely impossible. That is, a living organism cannot arise by chance from nonliving matter.

What can we know about how life began ? 
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.

By chance? - Not a chance !!
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.
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 !!

Abiogenesis is a mount insurmountable - by all means
Biological Cells are 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. The study below lists functional annotation descriptions ( proteins, enzymes). If just ONE of these 561 is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life. Let us suppose a fortunate accident would sort out, amongst over 500 known different types of amino acids, the 20 types, used for life. Not only would it have to select the right ones amongst these over 500 amino acids which can exist and come in two configurations -  left, and right-handed chiral directions. They would have to be joined somehow to the same assembly site on early earth in sufficient quantities. The availability of these amino acids would have to be synchronized so that at some point, either individually or in combination, they are all available at the same time. The selected parts must all be made available at the same ‘construction site,’ perhaps not simultaneously but certainly, at the time, they are needed.

Once there, each protein with an average of about 300 amino acids would have to be produced, each with its individual specific function. At least 561 of the right, life essential proteins. Each complementary to the others, in right shape and size, able to interact with others like lock and key. The individual proteins had to be mutually compatible, that is, ‘well-matched’ and capable of properly ‘interacting’: even if subsystems or parts are put together in the right order, they also need to interface correctly. If they are not joined together in a functional manner, no deal. Nothing will go. The parts must be coordinated in just the right way: even if all of the parts of a system are available at the right time, it is clear that the majority of ways of assembling them will be non-functional or irrelevant.

As a comparison: Imagine a print machine. If it had 561 parts, each had to be produced individually and then assembled together. If the cartridge is not extant, the printer cannot work. Same with biological Cells. Another major hurdle is, if there is no energy source, the printer won't work. Same with biological Cells. While we can plug an energy cable into a socket and connect the printer to an energy source, there was non-available on a prebiotic earth. Cells use extremely complex metabolic pathways to produce their energy in form of ATP.

So, somehow, early earth produced these 561 complementary proteins.  And if there is no energy in form of ATP molecules to drive each protein through phosphorylation, nothing goes. So besides these proteins, ATP would have had to be around, ready to do its job. The problem is: It takes ATP to make proteins. But it takes proteins to make ATP. What came first? Another major problem would be - these polypeptides would be exposed to UV radiation,      ( there was no protective UV shield yet on the atmosphere ), so rather than stabilize, they would disintegrate quickly.  All this would have had to happen by self-assembly, spontaneously by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction.

In Cells, fermentation is a very slow process to make ATP. In bacteria and eukaryotes, the production of ATP is done through the central metabolism pathways, but they yield only a small quantity of ATP. The major producers are ATP synthase, veritable nano turbines, another marvel, one of the most amazing molecular machines. And if they are not coupled to a proton gradient, which requires other complex proteins which create it, no deal. And if there are no mechanisms to produce the molecules used as burning fuel like glucose to drive the process of proton gradient formation, no deal either.  

Cells use complex molecular machines and EXTREMELY complex multistep pathways to synthesize each of these 20 amino acids, and enzymes measure and sensor with feedback loops precisely the rate of amino acids that are required of each AA type like a computer, and produces the right quantity, accordingly. And in order to economize energy, it recycles used proteins. Proteasomes are protein complexes which degrade unneeded or damaged proteins by proteolysis, a chemical reaction that breaks peptide bonds, and so, amino-acids are recycled, which is an enormous economy of energy expenditure to synthesize new proteins. Amino acids come from keto acids and other compounds in the Reductive Tricarboxylic Acid (rTCA) Cycle, a central metabolic pathway in all life forms. The problem here again is another catch22. It takes nine complex proteins of the reverse Citric Acid Cycle to fix carbon and make it available for the production of the carbon backbone of amino acids. But it takes this process to make the proteins and enzymes required in the Reductive Tricarboxylic Acid (rTCA) Cycle. We have only considered the make of amino acids, not taking in consideration, that to make the other basic building blocks of life, namely RNA, DNA, hydrocarbons and fatty acids, each constitutes in other catch22 situations.

So the problem of the arrangement of the right amino acid sequence to make just one protein is the least of all problems that origin of life research faces, they are so many, that we can say with confidence: Abiogenesis is a no-no.

A minimal estimate for the gene content of the last universal common ancestor
19 December 2005
A truly minimal estimate of the gene content of the last universal common ancestor, obtained by three different tree construction methods and the inclusion or not of eukaryotes (in total, there are 669 ortholog families distributed in 561 functional annotation descriptions ( proteins, enzymes) , including 52 which remain uncharacterized) This set of 669/561 sequence/function categories can be considered as the truly minimal estimate for the gene content of LUCA. LUCA  does not appear dramatically different from extant life

Minimal  gene content of the first biological cell = 561 functional annotation descriptions = that means, it cannot be reduced further = irreducibly complex

- Replication/recombination/repair/modification
- Transcription/regulation
- transslation/ribosome
- RNA processing
- cell division
- thermoprotection
- signaling
- proteolysis
- Transport/membrane
- Electron transport
- Metabolism

The gene content of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) with respect to DNA processing (replication, recombination, modification and repair) contains a wide range of functions. The following families/functions are identified:

- DNA polymerase
- excinuclease ABC
- DNA gyrase
- topoisomerase
- NADdependent DNA ligase
- DNA helicases
- mismatch repair MutS  and MutT
- endonucleases, RecA
- chromosome segregation SMC
- methyltransferase, methyladenine

I have not enough faith to believe in non-guided mechanisms to explain the origin of life. Do you?

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible EZiDLCw



Last edited by Otangelo on Mon Jun 21, 2021 1:10 pm; edited 12 times in total

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From Primordial Soup to the Prebiotic Beach

An interview with exobiology pioneer, Dr. Stanley L. Miller, University of California San Diego

1n 1953, a University of Chicago graduate student named Stanley Miller working in Harold Urey's lab flipped a switch sending electric current through a chamber containing a combination of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. The experiment yielded organic compounds including amino acids, the building blocks of life, and catapulted a field of study known as exobiology into the headlines. Since that time a new understanding of the workings of RNA and DNA, have increased the scope of the subject. Moreover, the discovery of prebiotic conditions on other planets and the announcement of a bacterial fossil originating on Mars has brought new attention to the study of life's origins. I spoke with Dr. Miller in his lab at UCSD about the field he has helped to make famous, exobiology.

Let start with the basics. Can you give a simple definition of exobiology?
The term exobiology was coined by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Joshua Lederberg. What it means is the study of life beyond the Earth. But since there's no known life beyond the Earth people say its a subject with no subject matter. It refers to the search for life elsewhere, Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and in other solar systems. It is also used to describe studies of the origin of life on Earth, that is, the study of pre-biotic Earth and what chemical reactions might have taken place as the setting for life's origin.

Some 4.6 billion years ago the planet was a lifeless rock, a billion years later it was teeming with early forms of life. Where is the dividing line between pre-biotic and biotic Earth and how is this determined?

We start with several factors. One, the Earth is fairly reliably dated to 4.55 billion years. The earliest evidence for life was 3.5 billion years based on findings at the Apex formation in Western Australia. A new discovery reported in the journal Nature indicates evidence for life some 300 million years before that. We presume there was life earlier, but there is no evidence beyond that point.
We really don't know what the Earth was like three or four billion years ago. So there are all sorts of theories and speculations. The major uncertainty concerns what the atmosphere was like. This is major area of dispute. In early 1950's, Harold Urey suggested that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere, since all of the outer planets in our solar system- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune- have this kind of atmosphere. A reducing atmosphere contains methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. The Earth is clearly special in this respect, in that it contains an oxygen atmosphere which is clearly of biological origin.
Although there is a dispute over the composition of the primitive atmosphere, we've shown that either you have a reducing atmosphere or you are not going to have the organic compounds required for life. If you don't make them on Earth, you have to bring them in on comets, meteorites or dust. Certainly some material did come from these sources. In my opinion the amount from these sources would have been too small to effectively contribute to the origin of life.

So while these are potential sources of organic compounds they are not essential for the creation of life on Earth?

As long as you have those basic chemicals and a reducing atmosphere, you have everything you need. People often say maybe some of the special compounds came in from space, but they never say which ones. If you can make these chemicals in the conditions of cosmic dust or a meteorite, I presume you could also make them on the Earth. I think the idea that you need some special unnamed compound from space is hard to support.
You have to consider separately the contributions of meteors, dust and comets. The amount of useful compounds you are going to get from meteorites is very small. The dust and comets may provide a little more. Comets contain a lot of hydrogen cyanide, a compound central to prebiotic synthesis of amino acids as well as purines. Some HCN came into the atmosphere from comets. Whether it survived impact, and how much, are open to discussion. I'm skeptical that you are going to get more than a few percent of organic compounds from comets and dust. It ultimately doesn't make much difference where it comes from. I happen to think prebiotic synthesis happened on the Earth, but I admit I could be wrong.
There is another part of the story. In 1969 a carbonaceous meteorite fell in Murchison Australia. It turned out the meteorite had high concentrations of amino acids, about 100 ppm, and they were the same kind of amino acids you get in prebiotic experiments like mine. This discovery made it plausible that similar processes could have happened on primitive Earth, on an asteroid, or for that matter, anywhere else the proper conditions exist.


-- View a photomicrograph of the Murchison Meteorite --

Doesn't the Panspermia theory looks at the question of ultimate origins of life in a slightly different way?

That's a different controversy. There are different versions of the theory. One idea is that there was no origin of life, that life, like the universe, has always existed and got to the Earth through space. That idea doesn't seem very reasonable since we know that the universe has not always existed, so life has to happen some time after the big bang 10 or 20 billion years ago.
It may be that life came to Earth from another planet. That may or may not be true, but still doesn't answer the question of where life started. You only transfer the problem to the other solar system. Proponents say conditions may have been more favorable on the other planet, but if so, they should tell us what those conditions were.
Along these lines, there is a consensus that life would have had a hard time making it here from another solar system, because of the destructive effects of cosmic rays over long periods of time.

What about submarine vents as a source of prebiotic compounds?

I have a very simple response to that . Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful.

Can you review with us some of the history and basic background of your original prebiotic experiments?

In the 1820's a German chemist named Woeller announced the synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate, creating a compound that occurs in biology. That experiment is so famous because it is considered the first example where inorganic compounds reacted to make a biological compound. They used to make a distinction between organic, meaning of biological origin, and inorganic- CO2, CO and graphite. We now know that there is no such distinction.
However, it remained a mystery how you could make organic compounds under geological conditions and have them organized into a living organism. There were all sorts of theories and speculation. It was once thought that if you took organic material, rags, rotting meat, etc, and let it sit, that maggots, rats etc. would arise spontaneously. It's not as crazy as it seems, considering DNA hadn't been discovered. It was then reasonable to hold those views if you consider living organisms as protoplasm, a life substance. This all changed in 1860 when Pasteur showed that you don't get living organisms except from other living organisms. This disproved the idea of spontaneous generation.
But spontaneous generation means two things. One is the idea that life can emerge from a pile of rags. The other is that life was generated once, hundreds of millions of years ago. Pasteur never proved it didn't happen once, he only showed that it doesn't happen all the time.
A number of people tried prebiotic experiments. But they used CO2F, nitrogen and water. When you use those chemicals, nothing happens. It's only when you use a reducing atmosphere that things start to happen.

Who came up with the idea of the reducing atmosphere?

Oparin, a Russian scientist, began the modern idea of the origin of life when he published a pamphlet in 1924. His idea was called the heterotrophic hypothesis: that the first organisms were heterotrophic, meaning they got their organic material from the environment, rather than having to make it, like blue-green algae. This was an important idea. Oparin also suggested that the less biosynthesis there is, the easier it is to form a living organism. Then he proposed the idea of the reducing atmosphere where you might make organic compounds.
He also proposed that the first organisms were coacervates, a special type of colloid. Nobody takes that last part very seriously anymore, but in 1936, this was reasonable since DNA was not known to be the genetic material..
In 1951, unaware of Oparin's work, Harold Urey came to the same conclusion about the reducing atmosphere. He knew enough chemistry and biology to figure that you might get the building blocks of life under these conditions.

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible 2s_millerTell us about the famous electrical discharge experiment.

The experiments were done in Urey's lab when I was a graduate student. Urey gave a lecture in October of 1951 when I first arrived at Chicago and suggested that someone do these experiments. So I went to him and said, "I'd like to do those experiments". The first thing he tried to do was talk me out of it. Then he realized I was determined. He said the problem was that it was really a very risky experiment and probably wouldn't work, and he was responsible that I get a degree in three years or so. So we agreed to give it six months or a year. If it worked out fine, if not, on to something else. As it turned out I got some results in a matter of weeks. 



In the early 1950s Stanley L. Miller, working in the laboratory of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, did the first experiment designed to clarify the chemical reactions that occurred on the primitive earth. In the flask at the bottom, he created an "ocean" of water, which he heated, forcing water vapor to circulate through the apparatus. The flask at the top contained an "atmosphere" consisting of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2) and the circulating water vapor.
Next he exposed the gases to a continuous electrical discharge ("lightning"), causing the gases to interact. Water-soluble products of those reactions then passed through a condenser and dissolved in the mock ocean. The experiment yielded many amino acids and enabled Miller to explain how they had formed. For instance, glycine appeared after reactions in the atmosphere produced simple compounds - formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. Years after this experiment, a meteorite that struck near Murchison, Australia, was shown to contain a number of the same amino acids that Miller identified and in roughly the same relative amounts. Such coincidences lent credence to the idea that Miller's protocol approximated the chemistry of the prebiotic earth. More recent findings have cast some doubt on that conclusion.


Taken from Leslie Orgel's Scientific American article
"The Origin of Life on Earth" (Scientific American, October, 1994)



You must have been excited to get such dramatic results so quickly, and with what, at the time, must have seemed like an outlandish hypothesis?
Oh yes. Most people thought I was a least a little bit crazy. But if you look at methane/ammonia vs CO2/nitrogen there was no doubt in my mind. It was very clear that if you want to make organic compounds it would be easier with methane. It's easy to say that but it is quite a bit more difficult to get organized and do the experiment.
The surprise of the experiment was the very large yield of amino acids. We would have been happy if we got traces of amino acids, but we got around 4 percent. Incidentally, this is probably the biggest yield of any similar prebiotic experiment conducted since then. The reason for that has to do with the fact that amino acids are made from even simpler organic compounds such as hydrogen cyanide and aldehydes.
That was the start. It all held together and the chemistry turned out to be not that outlandish after all.

What was the original reaction to your work in the science community?

There was certainly surprise. One of the reviewers simply didn't believe it and delayed the review process of the paper prior to publication. He later apologized to me. It was sufficiently unusual, that even with Urey's backing it was difficult to get it published. If I'd submitted it to "Science" on my own, it would still be on the bottom of the pile. But the work is so easy to reproduce that it wasn't long before the experiment was validated.
Another scientist was sure that there was some bacterial contamination of the discharge apparatus. When you see the organic compounds dripping off the electrodes, there is really little room for doubt. But we filled the tank with gas, sealed it, put it in an autoclave for 18 hours at 15 psi. Usually you would use 15 minutes. Of course the results were the same.
Nobody questioned the chemistry of the original experiment, although many have questioned what the conditions were on pre-biotic Earth. The chemistry was very solid.

How much of a role did serendipity play in the original setup?

Fortunately, Urey was so adamant at the time about methane that I didn't explore alternate gas mixtures. Now we know that any old reducing gases will do. CO2/hydrogen and nitrogen will do the trick, although not as well.
There was some serendipity in how we handled the water. If we hadn't boiled it and run it for a week, we wouldn't have gotten such good yields of amino acids. We knew right away that something happened rather quickly because you could see a color change after a couple of days.
The fact that the experiment is so simple that a high school student can almost reproduce it is not a negative at all. That fact that it works and is so simple is what is so great about it. If you have to use very special conditions with a very complicated apparatus there is a question of whether it can be a geological process.

The original study raised many questions. What about the even balance of L and D (left and right oriented) amino acids seen in your experiment, unlike the preponderance of L seen in nature? How have you dealt with that question?

All of these pre-biotic experiments yield a racemic mixture, that is, equal amounts of D and L forms of the compounds. Indeed, if you're results are not racemic, you immediately suspect contamination. The question is how did one form get selected. In my opinion, the selection comes close to or slightly after the origin of life. There is no way in my opinion that you are going to sort out the D and L amino acids in separate pools. My opinion or working hypothesis is that the first replicated molecule had effectively no asymmetric carbon

You are talking about some kind of pre-RNA?

Exactly a kind of pre-RNA. RNA has four asymmetric carbons in it. This pre-RNA must have somehow developed into RNA. There is a considerable amount of research now to try and figure out what that pre-RNA compound was, that is, what was the precursor to the RNA ribose-phosphate.

Peter E. Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen has proposed a polymer called peptide nucleic acid (PNA) as a precursor of RNA. Is this is where PNA comes in?

Exactly, PNA looks prebiotic. Currently that is the best alternative to ribose phosphate. Whether it was the original material or not is another issue.

Can you clarify one thing? Have all of the amino acids been synthesized in pre-biotic experiments, along with all the necessary components for making life?

Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids. If you count asparagine and glutamine you get thirteen basic amino acids. We don't know how many amino acids there were to start with. Asparagine and glutamine, for example, do not look prebiotic because they hydrolyze. The purines and pyrimidines can alos be made, as can all of the sugars, although they are unstable.

Your original work was published only a month apart from Watson and Crick's description of the DNA molecule. How has the field of molecular biology influenced the field of exobiology?

The thing that has probably changed the outlook the most is the discovery of ribozymes, the catalytic RNA. This means you can have an organism with RNA carrying out both the genetic functions and catalytic functions. That gets around the problem of protein synthesis, which is this incredibly complicated thing. There is a problem with RNA as a prebiotic molecule because the ribose is unstable. This leads us to the pre-RNA world.
The idea of the pre-RNA world is essentially the same as the RNA world, except you have a different molecule that replicates. Another thing worth remembering is that all these pre-biotic experiments produce amino acids. To have these amino acids around and not use them in the first living organism would be odd. So the role of amino acids in the origin of life is unknown but still likely.

Tell us about your recent work and the lagoon idea.

The primitive Earth had big oceans, but it also had lakes, lagoons and beaches. Our hypothesis is that the conditions may have been ideal on these beaches or drying lagoons for prebiotic reactions to occur, for the simple reason that the chemicals were more concentrated in these sites than in the middle of the ocean.

Is this because of the temperatures and also the presence of minerals as well?

Temperature is an important factor. Minerals have been thought by some to play a role in the origin of life, but they really haven't done much for us so far. People talk about how minerals might have helped catalyze reactions, but there are few examples where the mineral makes any difference.
Our most recent research tackled the problem of making pyrimidines- uracil and cytosine, in prebiotic conditions. For some reason it just doesn't work very well under dilute conditions. We showed that it works like a charm once you get things concentrated and dry it out a bit. This changed my outlook on where to start looking for prebiotic reactions.
Another example is our work with co-enzyme A. The business end of co-enzyme A is called pantetheine. We showed you could make this under these kind of pre-biotic "dry beach" conditions. We found that you didn't need it to be very hot, you can make it at 40 degrees C. This indicates the ease with which some of this chemistry can take place.

Temperature seems to be a talking point regarding prebiotic hypotheses.

We know we can't have a very high temperature, because the organic materials would simply decompose. For example, ribose degrades in 73 minutes at high temperatures, so it doesn't seem likely. Then people talk about temperature gradients in the submarine vent. I don't know what these gradients are supposed to do. My thinking is that a temperature between 0 and 10 degrees C would be feasible. The minute you get above 25 degrees C there are problems of stability.

How does the discovery of the Martian meteorite factor in to the discussion? Are you convinced these are the fossilized remains of extraterrestrial microorganisms?

I think the data is interesting and suggestive, but not yet conclusive. Let's accept that the meteorite does come from Mars. You have apparently got very small bacterial fossils also iron sulfide and magnetite sitting next to each other. Then there are these PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). All of this is suggestive but not compelling.
There are just two possibilities. Either there was life on Mars or there was not. I have no problem with the idea of life on Mars, the question remains whether this evidence is adequate. If it is correct, it has an implication for one of the big questions of prebiotic research. That is, is it easy or difficult to produce life from prebiotic compounds in prebiotic conditions? It seems that it would be difficult on Mars. If it turns out to be the case on Mars, where the conditions do not look very favorable, then it should apply to anywhere in the universe, or any planet with a suitable atmosphere and temperature.

Can you tell us about the field of exobiology today in context of the world of science research?

It is a very small field. There is a society, the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. It has only 300 members, a rather small society. My own lab is part of program called NSCORT (NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training). This program is conducted in close cooperation with NASA and supports five researchers along with graduate students, post-docs and undergraduate students.
The more important research are the experiments these days, rather than the trading of ideas. Good ideas are those that when reduced to an experiment end up working. Our approach is to do experiments and demonstrate things, not just talk about possibilities.

What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing studies in exobiology?

Well we are talking about solving chemical problems. Therefore a background in basic chemistry is essential along with knowledge in the fields of organic chemistry, biochemistry and some background in geology and physics. Exobiology is a small field with a lot of interaction. It is one of few fields where an undergraduate would be able to work with top people in the field almost immediately.
This interview was conducted in October, 1996

Emergence of life in an inflationary universe 03 February 2020
In spite of recent rapid development of biology, chemistry, Earth science and astronomy, the origin of life (abiogenesis) is still a great mystery in science. Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40–100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the formation of such a long polymer having a correct nucleotide sequence by random reactions seems statistically unlikely.  lmin must be shorter than ~20 nucleotides for the abiogenesis probability close to unity on a terrestrial planet, but a self-replicating activity is not expected for such a short RNA. A fundamental and unsolved problem is how an RNA polymer long enough to have a self-replicating RNA polymerase activity (i.e., RNA replicase ribozyme) emerged from prebiotic conditions and then triggered Darwinian evolution. RNA molecules shorter than 25 nucleotides (nt) do not show a specified function. Formation of just a single long strand may not be sufficient to initiate an abiogenesis event.  Instead a pair of identical strands may be necessary if one serves as a replicase ribozyme and the other as a template. Polymerization of RNA in water is a thermodynamically uphill process, and hence reacting monomers need to be activated. Some experiments yielded production of up to 40-mers of RNA, which may be long enough to have some biological activities. However, these results have not been reproducible, and only short oligomers of up to 10-mers were produced conclusively in recent experiments, with the abundance rapidly decreasing with the oligomer length. This trend is also consistent with the theoretical expectation for random adding of monomers. An experimental difficulty is that aggregates may easily be mistaken for polymers, depending on detection methods. A report of experimental production of long polymers (>120 nt) by ligation has been subject to reproducibility and the aggregate/polymer discrimination problem. A high concentration of oligomers is necessary for ligation to work efficiently, but this may be difficult because oligomer abundance rapidly decreases with oligomer length in polymerization by monomers, even if such a ligase activity exists. If we consider only the conservative abiotic polymerization, i.e., statistically adding monomers, the probability of abiogenesis may be extremely low on a terrestrial planet. Most part of the universe inflates forever, self-reproducing many subregions that undergo a conventional inflation followed by a hot big-bang universe. Then an infinite number of stars and galaxies would be formed, and we expect emergence of life even if the abiogenesis probability is infinitely small. The result of this work may also give an explanation for the homochirality of life. Even if activated monomers supplied to the polymerization cycle are a racemic mixture, life emerging from them would be homochiral, if homochirality is a necessary requirement for an RNA polymer to show biological activities. Simply it needs more time or volume for a homochiral polymer to be assembled by random polymerization, with Nnb twice as large as when ignoring chirality. On the other hand, the expected number of abiogenesis events is much smaller than unity when we observe a star, a galaxy, or even the whole observable universe. This gives an explanation to the Fermi’s paradox. The observable universe is just a tiny part, whose volume is likely smaller than 1∕1078 of the whole universe created by an inflation, and there is no strong reason to expect more than one abiogenesis event in such a small region. Even if Earth is the only planet that harbors life inside the observable universe, it does not contradict the Copernican principle, because life would have emerged on countless planets in the whole inflationary universe in which we exist.  The probability of finding biosignatures from planets or satellites in the Solar System or from exoplanets is negligibly small. A theoretically intriguing question is whether a chemical RNA-like long polymer is easily formed to contain information and show biological activities eventually leading to higher organisms, when physical laws are arbitrarily made, e.g., by random choices of fundamental physical constants. Perhaps this may be the ultimate mystery regarding the origin of life, which is, of course, far beyond the scope of this work.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_deeplink_PID100052172&utm_content=deeplink


1. https://web.archive.org/web/20080518054852/http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/NM/miller.php



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Hugh Ross International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) Conference March 2, 2020
Regarding abiogenesis lab experiemtns, Robert Shapiro pointed out how much intelligent intervention and design were needed to produce laboratory outcomes. He added that if his peers could not produce chemical outcomes known to be vital for any conceivable OOL model with far less experimenter interference then they simply were proving that the origin of life requires an intelligent designer.
Sixteen years later chemist Clemens Richert published an article in Nature Communications in which he more fully articulated Shapiro’s point. He began by explaining that the reputed goal of experimental biochemists doing origin-of-life research is “to re-enact what may have happened when life arose from inanimate material.” However, he noted that such reenactments are unrealistic if one or more human interventions are required.
One such intervention that inevitably occurs arises from the experimenters’ desires that their results be reproducible by other biochemists. If their results cannot be reproduced, there is little, if any, likelihood that they will be published in any reputable science journal. This need for reproducibility forces the biochemists to begin with known quantities of pure chemicals. However, such fixed, pure quantities are unrealistic in any conceivable natural prebiotic scenario. The second law of thermodynamics inevitably introduces mixtures of structurally related but chemically interfering molecular aggregates.
Furthermore, to be relevant to any conceivable natural origin-of-life scenario the experiment must not involve any human intervention after the start of a reaction. There cannot be any addition or subtraction of chemicals during the reaction. The reaction must be allowed to unfold and samples drawn only after the reaction is completely finished.
Toward the end of his article Richert takes to task the now popular experiments of unending cycles of hydration and dehydration and/or cooling and heating. Richert points out, for example, that for cooling and heating cycles to be productive requires repeated specified transitions in a single locale from arctic to volcanic conditions then back to arctic within just hours or a few days. Such requirements, he understates, seem unrealistic for natural scenarios.
In his article, Richert coined a phrase for the experimenter intervention. He called it “the Hand of God dilemma.” His point is that experimenter intervention is akin to claiming that God did it. In saying this, he admits that “most of us [OOL researchers] are not comfortable with the idea of divine intervention in this context.”
Richert, nevertheless, makes a strong appeal to his fellow OOL researchers. So as not to deceive researchers in other disciplines, and especially the lay public, or to exaggerate their successes to their research peers, he recommends that his peers reveal the level of experimenter intervention. In their publications, they should state as accurately as possible how many times and exactly when and where in their experiments they commit the Hand of God dilemma.
https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/read/todays-new-reason-to-believe/2020/03/02/is-the-hand-of-god-evident-in-life-s-origin?fbclid=IwAR0CabpDq5A-TlYlL6sJtzYgKW_QPSpvhOQlM9cXYHU98Cndo2DZ2uR6eGU


Observation: 
The origin of life depends on biological cells, which perpetuate life upon the complex action of molecular computers, hardware ( DNA ), software, a language using signs and codes like the alphabet, an instructional blueprint, ( the genetic and over a dozen epigenetic codes ) information retrieval ( RNA polymerase ) transmission ( messenger RNA ) translation ( Ribosome ) signaling ( hormones ) complex machines ( proteins ), factory assembly lines ( fatty acid synthase, non-ribosomal peptide synthase ), error check and repair systems  ( exonucleolytic proofreading, strand-directed mismatch repair ), recycling methods ( endocytic recycling ), waste grinders and management  ( Proteasome Garbage Grinders )  , power generating plants ( mitochondria ), power turbines ( ATP synthase ), and electric circuits ( the metabolic network ).  Biological cells are veritable micro-miniaturized factories containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery. Biological Cells do not resemble factories, they ARE an industrial park of various interconnected factories, working in conjunction.

Hypothesis (Prediction)
 Complex machines and interconnected factory parks are intelligently designed. Biological cells are intelligently designed. Factories can not self-assemble spontaneously by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction.The claim can be falsified, once someone can demonstrate that factories can self-assemble spontaneously by orderly aggregation and sequentially correct manner without external direction.

Experiment: 
Since  origin of life experiments began, nobody was able to bring up an experiment, replicating the origin of life by natural means. 

Eugene Koonin, advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics, writes in his book: 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. "

Scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process absent the intervention of a conscious creative agency.
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.

Conclusion:
Upon the logic of mutual exclusion, design and non-design are mutually exclusive (it was one or the other) so we can use eliminative logic: if non-design is highly improbable, then design is highly probable. The evaluative status of non-design (and thus design) can be decreased or increased by observable empirical evidence, so a theory of design is empirically responsive and is testable, so, by applying Bayesian probability, we can conclude that Life is most probably intelligently designed.

Kunio Kawamura Evolution, Origin of Life, Concepts and Methods page 10
The origin-of-life problem has been well accepted as a practical scientific problem through the achievements by Pasteur, Oparin, and Miller. The difference between modern organisms and RNA-based life-like systems is quite large. Therefore, the uncertainty on how the RNA-based life-like system could have evolved to the modern method including the complicated assignment mechanism between DNA sequence and amino acid sequence of proteins is currently an important issue. 

My comment:  Why does the author mention evolution, if there was not such a mechanism at disposal at this stage?

The gap between the assignment methods between genotype and phenotype in the RNA-based life-like system and that in modern organisms involves the emergence of tRNA, rRNA, and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase.

My comment: Agreed. And all these different RNA's,  tRNA, rRNA, and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase had to be operational together to get to a translation process as used in modern life forms. One would have had no function without the other. 

Different kinds of functional RNA molecules should have been present for the construction of the RNA-based life-like systems. However, it is unclear what kinds of functions were necessary to make a life-like system.

My comment: It is unclear because there is no feasible way to reduce the pathway from genes to proteins.

The whole process of the spontaneous formation of RNA polymerase ribozymes from nucleotide monomers under prebiotic conditions is not yet clear. Presumably, primitive RP ribozymes would have been produced spontaneously as the model RP ribozymes can be constructed by using the in vitro selection engineering method of RNA

My comment: presumably based on what evidence? There is no evidence that this would have been possible.

Here, we briefly consider proteins from the viewpoint of the RNA world hypothesis. Thus, an argument that the difficulty for solving the connective pathway between the RNA-based lifelike systems to the modern systems is evidence to deny the RNA world hypothesis is not correct. The hypothetical protein-like-molecule-based life-like system should have possessed an assignment method between genotype and phenotype at least if it was present before the modern system. Protein or protein-like molecules are considered as key molecules during the chemical evolution from the RNA-based life-like system to the most primitive organism.

My comment: How to assign 64 codons to 20 amino acids is an intractable abiogenesis problem. There was no affinity, since the binding of codons to tRNAs is not directly physically connected, and there is another, third player,  aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, which must also have the right assignment, and recognize which tRNA belongs to which amino acids.

For the spontaneous formation of oligopeptides, it was shown that peptides could have formed under such extreme Earth conditions. However, the peptide formation found by the simulation experiments was not efficient, as the yields of oligopeptides remain 0.1–1%

My comment: These are figures of "success" that obviously demonstrate remote success.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-30363-1





How did life begin? Abiogenesis. Origin of life from nonliving matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNK3u8uVG7o&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2RgT7KvOntGEnHKiFNYfU4T2Fwyg1R2oZq4loVM5bUqdSgsQN_9INXOEM


At the fundamental level all living things contain a trinity of elements. First, nucleic acids, which make up the DNA or it's simpler form called RNA. These contain the blueprints of life and are self-replicating molecules. Second, there
are proteins, which are the workhorses that perform the important functions of your body. And third, are lipids which encapsulate the cells of your body.So these fatty membranes composed of lipids were critical components for abiogenesis.

My comment: All living things contain a trinity of elements implies irreducible complexity. Without at least these three elements, life could not exist ( there are many more, however )

Before any living things existed, before animals, plants and even bacteria existed, these three things had to have been present in the primordial soup in order for life to start.

My comment: What the author conveniently does not say, is that none of the basic building blocks of life have ever been synthesized in the laboratory.

However, just this year, in 2019 researchers at the University of Washington showed that lipid spheres do not disassemble if they are in the presence of amino acids, which are precursors to protein molecules. In addition, the enclosing of amino acids within cell walls allows amino acids to concentrate within the walls and interact with each other to form proteins.

My comment: n order to have the amino acids used in life, you have to select the right ones amongst over 500 that occur naturally on earth. [/size]To get functional ones, you need to sort them out between left-handed and right-handed ones ( the homochirality problem). Only left-handed amino acids are used in cells. There is no selection process known besides the one used in cells by sophisticated enzymes, which produce only left-handed amino acids. This is just a tiny problem to form proteins. 

So now we see that lipids and proteins can potentially form in the presence of each other. 

My comment: 
This is pure pseudo-scientific nonsense. Far more is required for proteins. Instructional/specified complex information is required to get the right amino acid sequence which is essential to get the functionality in a vast sequence space ( amongst trillions os possible sequences, rare are the ones that provide function ) of random chemical reactions to setup amino-acid polypeptide chains to produce  functional proteins, a minimal proteome on early earth external to cellular biosynthesis: 1 in 10^[sup]350.000 That's virtually the same as 0%. There are 10^80 atoms in the universe.

In a 2009 study, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy New York, showed that current-day RNA could have formed on the surface of clays which act like catalyst to bring RNA bases together, as shown in this animation. A 2017 paper by scientists from McMaster University in Canada, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, showed that the building blocks of RNA could have polymerized in the early Earth using organic molecules from meteorites and interplanetary dust in shallow ponds.

My comment: Although Sutherland has shown that it is possible to build one part of RNA from small molecules, objectors to the RNA-world theory say the RNA molecule as a whole is too complex to be created using early-Earth geochemistry. "The flaw with this kind of research is not in chemistry. The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth," says Robert Shapiro

The wet/dry cycle of these ponds, they showed, is conducive to RNA polymerization. They also theorized that such polymers were probably present on earth shortly after its formation as early as 4.17 billion years ago.

My comment: This leaves out that there are many other unsolved problems of how to make RNA prebiotically. None of the bases have been synthesized in the lab either. Nor the reaction to join the three parts together. The author leaves this information conveniently out in his narrative. 

In the 1950s, several experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey verified that the natural formation of amino acids, components of proteins, and other organic compounds, out of organic materials, was possible under the atmospheric conditions of the primordial earth.

My comment: An interview from 1998 with exobiology pioneer, Dr. Stanley L. Miller, University of California San Diego 


We've shown that either you have a reducing atmosphere or you are not going to have the organic compounds required for life. If you don't make them on Earth, you have to bring them in on comets, meteorites or dust. Certainly, some material did come from these sources. In my opinion, the amount from these sources would have been too small to effectively contribute to the origin of life.

The amount of useful compounds you are going to get from meteorites is very small. The dust and comets may provide a little more. Comets contain a lot of hydrogen cyanide, a compound central to prebiotic synthesis of amino acids as well as purines. Some HCN came into the atmosphere from comets. Whether it survived impact, and how much, are open to discussion. I'm skeptical that you are going to get more than a few percent of organic compounds from comets and dust.

it was trillions upon trillions of amino acids reacting in countless places, over millions of years, that resulted in simple protein molecules. There are about 4x10^47 molecules of water in Earth's oceans. Even if there was one amino acid among 1 million water molecules, that would be 10 to the power 41 molecules of amino acids that had the opportunity to interact with each other, and to form proteins in numerous environments, in numerous places,
and in numerous trials, over millions of years, to produce proteins. 

My comment: That would still not be enough. If we sum up the total number of amino acids for a minimal Cell, there would have to be about 400 proteins x average 400 amino acids  =  160.000 amino acids, which would have to be bonded in the right sequence, choosing for each position amongst 20 different amino acids, and selecting only the left-handed, while sorting out the right-handed ones. That means each position would have to be selected correctly from 40 variants !! that is 1 right selection out of 40^160.000 possibilities or 10^350.000 !! Obviously, a gigantic number far above any realistic probability to occur by unguided events. Even a trillion universes, each hosting a trillion planets, and each shuffling a trillion times in a trillionth of a second, continuously for a trillion years, would not be enough. Such astronomically unimaginably gigantic odds are in the realm of the utmost extremely impossible. 

In 2014 Jeremy England, physics professor at MIT, showed mathematically that the driving force for chemical evolution may be hidden in physics, in Newton's second law of thermodynamics. that's our old friend "entropy." From a physics point of view, the one thing that distinguishes living things from nonliving things is its ability to capture energy and convert it to heat. England argues that when exposed to an external source of energy, such as the sun, any group of molecules will restructure themselves to dissipate more and more energy. 

My comment: 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

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-virtually-impossible#7582


I gave a quick look at what kind of storytellers the authors of Rational Wiki are when the issue is the origin of life

Abiogenesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Claim: Any estimate must also consider the number of life-supporting planets in the universe, as we are here because abiogenesis occurred on one world, possibly one of billions of candidates.
Response: EXOTIC LIFE SITES: THE FEASIBILITY OF FAR-OUT HABITATS
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t232-life-on-other-planets-a-real-possibility

Paul Davies, the fifth miracle page 53:
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.

The data demonstrate that the probability of finding even one planet with the capacity to support life falls short of one chance in 10^140 (that number is 1 followed by 140 zeros).
http://worldview3.50webs.com/mathproofcreat.html

Claim: Similarly, while it's not clear exactly what parts of the Earth's history were most conducive, life had hundreds of millions, if not billions of years, to come about, and for much of that time conditions were very different from today.
Response: Time makes everything becoming possible. Really ?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2025-time-makes-everything-becoming-possible-really

Dr. Jason Lisle The insurmountable obstacles to evolution are simply swept under the rug of vast ages.

This is a frequently raised, but unsophisticated argument for Darwinian evolution and the origin of life. You can't just vaguely appeal to vast and unending amounts of time (and other probabilistic resources) and assume that Darwinian evolution or whatever mechanisms you propose for the origin of life, can produce anything "no matter how complex." Rather, you have to demonstrate that sufficient probabilistic resources or evolutionary mechanisms indeed exist to produce the feature.

What is education" when it produces individuals who swear that evolution is true or that those who oppose it don't understand the process.

The so called evolutionary argument is more a matter of assaulting the intelligence of those who oppose it with a range assertions that proponents of evolution really have no answer, how these mechanisms really work. To argue that forever is long enough for the complexity of life to reveal itself is an untenable argument. The numbers are off any scale we can relate to as possible to explain what we see of life. Notwithstanding, you have beings in here who go as far to say it's all accounted for already, as if they know something nobody else does.

http://bevets.com/evolutionevidence.htm

A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "I'm a billionaire."
You say "Prove it."
He says "ok", and he points across the street at a bank. "My money is in that bank there." (The bank is closed.)
You say "What does that prove?"
He says "Everyone knows banks have money in them"
You say "I know there is money in the bank, but why should I believe that it's YOUR money?"
"Because it's GREEN" he says.
"What else can you show me?"
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a penny. "See -- I'm a billionaire."
You're still skeptical. 'What does that prove?', you ask.
"I'M A BILLIONAIRE" he states loudly (obviously annoyed that you would question him). He reaches in another pocket and pulls out another penny, "Do you believe me now?"

"Given so much time,
the "impossible" becomes possible,
The possible probable,
And the probable virtually certain,
One only has to wait:
Time itself performs the miracles."
(Wald, G., Scientific American, 1954)

Claim: Abiogenesis is not a single step event, but a process. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's argument that the probability of all the chemicals in a bacterium arose by chance is around 10^40,000 but nobody suggests that bacteria appeared by chance with no simpler precursor
Response:The cell is irreducibly complex
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1299-the-cell-is-irreducibly-complex

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
http://www.ru.nl/english/@893712/protocells-formed/

Claim: One of the popular current hypotheses involves chemical reactivity around hydrothermal vents. This hypothesis has yet to be empirically proven although the current evidence is generally supportive of it.
Response:The hydrothermal-vent theory, and why it fails

Dr. Stanley L. Miller, University of California San Diego  14
What about submarine vents as a source of prebiotic compounds?
I have a very simple response to that . Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful.

The real reason to reject abiogenesis is not simply because it has never been observed by all of mankind’s collective experiences, it is because of all the facts we are observing in microbiology, chemistry, & basic physics that all continue to add to the list of minimal requirements which ALL are simultaneously needed to make what we ironically call “simple” life.
Since we have gone well beyond the superficial and false equivalency of a cell and a bubble of film, and can look at each known required component. We can count the needed connections, map out their required sequence, and know all the possible physical configurations and combinations. This knowledge of the real world all can be used to calculate the probability that any of these components or needed events could ever occur by chance reliance on natural processes alone.

The faith that anything and everything is possible in nature given enough time is naive and unrealistic. There are real physical boundaries, we can flip a coin for as long as you want, but it will only come up head, tails or on its edge. It will never come up “6” because coins are not dice. Molecules and biochemical bonds also have physical dimensions and limitations. It is proven what they will allow. There are temporal boundaries, we all have our opinions on the age of the universe, but even taken to the largest and most extreme estimate anyone has proposed, it never is enough time to give abiogenesis even a little bit of a chance.

Each mathematically & statically impossible event or structure provides more reason to reject abiogenesis and accept the Only reasonable alternative, intelligent design and abilities well beyond man to orchestrate and execute the creation of the amazing variety of life we see all around us.


Heredity phenomena and the origin of “species”

My comment:
The title of this book is misleading. There cannot be darwinian evolution prior to DNA replication, which began when life began. Anything before cannot be explained by Darwins concept of mutations and natural selection.

Even in the absence of any genetic functionality, if an entropic metabolism was operating, the vesicular individuals could continue to exist. They were living organisms of certain lifetimes. Since they did not possess any self-renewal mechanism, there were no “species” only miscellaneous vesicular individuals of various dimensions, morphologies, etc. This was an “Era of Non-genetic Organisms” existing prior to the emergence of genetic function.

My comment : " Vesicular individuals were the living organisms of certain lifetimes ". That's not what is commonly understood of what life is.

What is life ?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1435-paul-davies-what-is-life

Reproduction.
Metabolism.
Homeostasis
Nutrition.
Complexity.
Organization.
Growth and development.
Information content.
Hardware/software entanglement.
Permanence and change.

Genetic function of living organisms is a self-replication mechanism, i.e., a mechanism to build another body (e.g., a new vesicular individual). It is a much more efficient means of synthesizing a body than by the chance assembly of a body from various bioorganic molecules. The formation of a new body contributes to reduce the total entropy of the Earth through the reduction of entropy of the Earth’s light elements. Therefore, the emergence of the genetic phenomenon of self-replication, which efficiently prepares new individuals, is understood to be due to the reduction of the total entropy of the Earth. Since the dimensions of vesicular individuals are limited by the surrounding membrane, it is also physically reasonable that a vesicle that has accumulated an excessive polymer loading by vesicle fusion will become unstable leading to some stimulus to divide to two or more similar individuals. Therefore, a “species” appeared in the microcosm of the miscellaneous vesicular individuals through the efficient production of large numbers of individuals with the same nature by a self-replication mechanism. The self-replication system would soon have permeated colonies of miscellaneous individuals because of its efficiency and, eventually, only individuals belonging to particular species would have been present. From a physical point of view, this is the origin of the heredity phenomenon and “the origin of species,” which C. Darwin could not have known. The reduction of the Earth’s entropy by reduction of its heat is responsible for the existence of these species.

Claim: It is a much more efficient means of synthesizing a body than by the chance assembly of a body from various bioorganic molecules.
Response: Did these vesicles and basic molecules "desire" to synthesize a body and become alive?
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

Claim: Despite being a moment of critical importance, the birth of life was simply the point at which some vesicular individual could fulfill the three principal attributes of life namely individuality, metabolism, and genetic function.
Response: Sure it was. But there is nothing simple about it. It is an unbridgeable hurdle. The complexity of the most simple metabolic network is MONUMENTAL. About 120 proteins are required:

How Cellular Enzymatic and Metabolic networks  point to design
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2371-how-cellular-enzymatic-and-metabolic-networks-point-to-design

A minimal estimate of the proteins of the last universal common ancestor
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2110-what-might-be-a-cells-minimal-requirement-of-parts#6558

Claim: The process described above is the final stage of the birth of life. Vesicular individuals survived hydrolytic conditions establishing metabolic function, then acquired genetic function, by which “species” were introduced. We now understand reasonably well the entire process of molecular evolution up to the birth of life from the point of view of their physical and historical inevitabilities.
Response:
NO!! no no no. Thats simply not true !!
James Tour on abiogenesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2617-james-tour-on-abiogenesis
It is clear, chemists and biologists are clueless. I wrote, “Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding. They may find a firmer—and possibly a radically different—scientific theory. The basis upon which we as scientists are relying is so shaky that we must openly state the situation for what it is: it is a mystery.” Note that since the time of my submission of that commentary cited above, articles continue to be published on prebiotic chemistry, so I will link to my short critiques of a few of those newer articles so that the interested reader can get an ongoing synthetic chemist’s assessment of the proposals:

If we consider the reverse process, as proposed by the widely accepted “RNA world” hypothesis, there arise various questions and contradictions that cannot be resolved. Why and how was such a macromolecule as RNA created? Even if RNA had been formed, why was it not hydrolyzed in large quantities of water, even hydrothermal water? Even if RNA was protected from hydrolysis, why did its genetic mechanism appear? Why does an organism possess a genetic apparatus? If the vesicle precursors of life possessed genetic function, why did vesicles later acquire proteins? The “RNA world theory” cannot be used to account for all of these questions even under multiple assumptions. The fact is that following the formation of polymers in deep subterranean regions, some have acquired the three principal attributes of life in the order of individuality, followed by metabolism, and finally genetic function, in order that they could have survived in the dynamically varying environment on the Earth. Genetic processes contributed to efficiently generate new species in the population of organisms and also increased biodiversity through its self-replication mechanism. Errors in the self-replication process lead to new species, thus contributing further to the creation of higher order, more complex and lower entropy species in the changing environment on the Earth. The sequence of molecular evolution followed by biological evolution of organisms connected by the birth of life entails the ordering of the Earth’s light elements, which is required for the reduction of the entropy of the Earth. By following the present argument, the reader may understand how and why life has appeared and is developing.

True. The question HOW it happened, IMHO, is a big mystery. Exempt when it isn't, when we know the author of life !!

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Sddfsd10



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12Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Empty Paradoxes in the Origin of Life Sat Mar 21, 2020 4:37 pm

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Paradoxes in the Origin of Life

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7309

Steven A. Benner Paradoxes in the Origin of Life 5 Dec. 2014

The Asphalt Paradox 
An enormous amount of empirical data have established, as a rule, that organic systems, given energy and left to themselves, devolve to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”. The literature reports (to our knowledge) ZERO CONFIRMED OBSERVATIONS where  evolution emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system. It is impossible for any non-living chemical system to escape devolution to enter into the Darwinian world of the “living”. 
https://sci-hub.ren/10.1007/s11084-014-9379-0

Decomposition of Monomers, Polymers and Molecular Systems: An Unresolved Problem 2017 Jan 17
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370405/
It is clear that non-activated nucleotide monomers can be linked into polymers under certain laboratory conditions designed to simulate hydrothermal fields. However, both monomers and polymers can undergo a variety of decomposition reactions that must be taken into account because biologically relevant molecules would undergo similar decomposition processes in the prebiotic environment.

OPEN QUESTIONS IN ORIGIN OF LIFE: EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON THE ORIGIN OF NUCLEIC ACIDS AND PROTEINS WITH SPECIFIC AND FUNCTIONAL SEQUENCES BY A CHEMICAL SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY APPROACH February 2014
Attempts to obtain copolymers, for instance by a random polymerization of monomer mixtures, yield a difficult to characterize mixture of all different products. To the best of our knowledge, there is no clear approach to the question of the prebiotic synthesis of macromolecules with an ordered sequence of residues.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2001037014600076

Rob Stadler A Strikingly Unnatural Property of Biopolymers
Even in a very short DNA of just two nucleotides, there are dozens of incorrect possible arrangements of the components, and only one correct arrangement. The probability of consistent arrangement decreases exponentially as the DNA lengthens. If natural processes could polymerize these monomers, the result would be chaotic “asphalt,” not highly organized, perfectly consistent biopolymers. Think about it — if monomers spontaneously polymerized within cells, the cell would die because all monomers would be combined into useless random arrangements.
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/long-story-short-a-strikingly-unnatural-property-of-biopolymers/




Intractable Mixtures and the Origin of Life 2007
Whatever the exact nature of an RNA precursor which may have become the first selfreplicating molecule, how could the chemical homogeneity which seems necessary to permit this kind of mechanism to even come into existence have been achieved? What mechanism would have selected for the incorporation of only threose, or ribose, or any particular building block, into short oligomers which might later have undergone chemically selective oligomerization? Virtually all model prebiotic syntheses produce mixtures. 6

CAIRNS-SMITH genetic takeover, page 70
Suppose that by chance some particular coacervate droplet in a primordial ocean happened to have a set of catalysts, etc. that could convert carbon dioxide into D-glucose. Would this have been a major step forward
towards life? Probably not. Sooner or later the droplet would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean and never have been heard of again. It would not have mattered how ingenious or life-like some early system was; if it
lacked the ability to pass on to offspring the secret of its success then it might as well never have existed. So I do not see life as emerging as a matter of course from the general evolution of the cosmos, via chemical evolution, in one grand gradual process of complexification. Instead, following Muller (1929) and others, I would take a genetic View and see the origin of life as hinging on a rather precise technical puzzle. What would have been the easiest way that hereditary machinery could have formed on the primitive Earth?



The Water Paradox:
The hydrolytic deamination of DNA and RNA nucleobases is rapid and irreversible, as is the base-catalyzed cleavage of RNA in water.  RNA requires water to function, but RNA CANNOT emerge in water and does not persist in water without repair. Life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to  RNA necessary for life.

The Information-Need Paradox.
Biopolymers that might plausibly support “replication involving replicable imperfections” RIRI evolution ARE TOO LONG TO HAVE ARISEN SPONTANEOUSLY from the amounts of building blocks that might plausibly (again by theory) have escaped asphaltic devolution in water.

The Single Biopolymer Paradox.
Even if we can make biopolymers prebiotically, it IS HARD TO IMAGINE making two or three (DNA, RNA, proteins) at the same time. 

The Probability Paradox.
Experiments show that RNA molecules that catalyze the destruction of RNA are more likely to arise in a pool of random (with respect to fitness) sequences than RNA molecules that catalyze the replication of RNA, with or without imperfections.  Thus, even if we solve the asphalt paradox, the water paradox, the information need paradox, and the single biopolymer paradox, we still must mitigate or set aside chemical theory that makes destruction, not biology, the natural outcome of are already magical chemical system.

(a) The Asphalt Paradox (Neveu et al. 2013).
An enormous amount of empirical data have established, as a rule, that organic systems, given energy and left to themselves, devolve to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”. Theory that enumerates small molecule space, as well as Structure Theory in chemistry, can be construed to regard this devolution a necessary consequence of theory. Conversely, the literature reports (to our knowledge) exactly zero confirmed observations where “replication involving replicable imperfections” (RIRI) evolution emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system. Further, chemical theories, including the second law of thermodynamics, bonding theory that describes the “space” accessible to sets of atoms, and structure theory requiring that replication systems occupy only tiny fractions of that space, suggest that it is impossible for any non-living chemical system to escape devolution to enter into the Darwinian world of the “living”. Such statements of impossibility apply even to macromolecules not assumed to be necessary for RIRI evolution. Again richly supported by empirical observation, material escapes from known metabolic cycles that might be viewed as models for a “metabolism first” origin of life, making such cycles short-lived. Lipids that provide tidy compartments under the close supervision of a graduate student (supporting a protocell first model for origins) are quite non-robust with respect to small environmental perturbations, such as a change in the salt concentration, the introduction of organic solvents, or a change in temperature.

b) The Water Paradox:
Water is commonly viewed as essential for life, and theories of water are well known to support this as a requirement. So are biopolymers, like RNA, DNA, and proteins. However, these biopolymers are corroded by water. For example, the hydrolytic deamination of DNA and RNA nucleobases is rapid and irreversible, as is the base-catalyzed cleavage of RNA in water. This allows us to construct a paradox: RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair. Any solution to the “origins problem” must manage the paradox forced by pairing this theory and this observation; life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g. RNA) necessary for life.

(c) The Information-Need Paradox.
Theory can estimate the amount of information required for a chemical system to gain access to replication with imperfections that are themselves replicable. These estimates vary widely. However, by any current theory, biopolymers that might plausibly support RIRI evolution are too long to have arisen spontaneously from the amounts of building blocks that might plausibly (again by theory) have escaped asphaltic devolution in water. If a biopolymer is assumed to be necessary for RIRI evolution, we must resolve the paradox arising because implausibly high concentrations of building blocks generate biopolymers having inadequate amounts of information. These propositions from theory and observation also force the conclusion that the emergence of (in this case, biopolymer-based) life is impossible.

(d) The Single Biopolymer Paradox.
Even if we can make biopolymers prebiotically, it is hard to imagine making two or three (DNA, RNA, proteins) at the same time. For several decades, this simple observation has driven the search for a single biopolymer that “does” both genetics and catalysis. RNA might be such a biopolymer. However, genetics versus catalysis place very different demands on the behavior of a biopolymer. According to theory, catalytic biopolymers should fold; genetic biopolymers should not fold. Catalytic biopolymers should contain many building blocks; genetic biopolymers should contain few. Perhaps most importantly, catalytic biopolymers must be able to, catalyze reactions, while genetic biopolymers should not be able to catalyze reactions and, in particular, reactions that destroy the genetic biopolymer. Any “biopolymer first” model for origins must resolve these paradoxes, giving us a polymer that both folds and does not fold, has many building blocks at the same time as having few, and has the potential to catalyze hard-but-desired reactions without the potential to catalyze easy-but undesired reactions.

(e) The Probability Paradox.
Some biopolymers, like RNA, strike a reasonable compromise between the needs of genetics and the needs of catalysis. Further, no theory creates a paradox that excludes the possibility that some RNA might catalyze the replication of RNA, with imperfections, where the imperfections are replicable. However, experiments show that RNA molecules that catalyze the destruction of RNA are more likely to arise in a pool of random (with respect to fitness) sequences than RNA molecules that catalyze the replication of RNA, with or without imperfections. Chemical theory expects this to be the case, as the base-catalyzed cleavage of RNA is an “easy” reaction (stereoelectronically), while the SN2 reaction that synthesizes a phosphodiester bond is a “difficult” reaction. Thus, even if we solve the asphalt paradox, the water paradox, the information need paradox, and the single biopolymer paradox, we still must mitigate or set aside chemical theory that makes destruction, not biology, the natural outcome of are already magical chemical system.

Steven A. Benner Prebiotic plausibility and networks of paradox-resolving independent models 12 December 2018

Unfortunately, current theory holds that Earth’s native atmosphere was more oxidizing than the Miller atmosphere. Carbon was more likely present as carbon dioxide (CO2), not methane. Nitrogen was more likely present as dinitrogen (N2), not ammonia. This model is supported by detailed studies of rocks surviving from that time8. More unfortunately, such atmospheres are very bad sources of HCN, HCCCN, and the other reduced molecules on these lists of prebiotically plausible compounds, including those in popular models for the prebiotic synthesis of adenine. Thus, the prebiotic plausibility of HCN, the other molecules, and adenine long ago vanished as Earth-made species, even though literature too voluminous to cite here continues to assume otherwise.

This creates a paradox. If one premises that life originated via an RNA-First prebiotic process that used adenine as a precursor and that adenine was formed from HCN from a Hadean terran atmosphere, then the premises that view HCN as an impossible product of our early atmosphere force the conclusion that life could not have originated on Earth. An unacceptable conclusion follows by the force of logic from seemingly acceptable premises.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07274-y

Timothy R. Stout, George Matzko A Natural Origin-of-Life: Every Hypothetical Step Appears Thwarted by Abiogenetic Randomization May 5, 2019 

Prebiotic processes naturally randomize their feedstock. This has resulted in the failure of every experimentally tested hypothetical step in abiogenesis beginning with the 1953 Miller-Urey Experiment and continuing to the present. Not a single step has been demonstrated that starts with appropriate supply chemicals, operates on the chemicals with a prebiotic process, and yields new chemicals that represent progress towards life and which can also be used in a subsequent step as produced. Instead, the products of thousands of experiments over more than six decades consistently exhibit either increased randomization over their initial composition or no change. We propose the following hypothesis of Abiogenetic Randomization as the root cause for most if not all of the failures: 1) prebiotic processes naturally form many different kinds of products; life requires a few very specific kinds. 2) The needs of abiogenesis spatially and temporally are not connected to and do not change the natural output of prebiotic processes. 3) Prebiotic processes naturally randomize feedstock. A lengthy passage of time only results in more complete randomization of the feedstock, not eventual provision of chemicals suitable for life. The Murchison meteorite provides a clear example of this. 4) At each hypothetical step of abiogenesis, the ratio of randomized to required products proves fatal for that step. 5. The statistical law of large numbers applies, causing incidental appearances of potentially useful products eventually to be overwhelmed by the overall, normal product distribution. 6) The principle of emergence magnifies the problems: the components used in the later steps of abiogenesis become so intertwined that a single-step first appearance of the entire set is required. Small molecules are not the answer. Dynamic self-organization requires from the beginning large proteins for replication, metabolism, and active transport. Many steps across the entire spectrum of abiogenesis are examined, showing how the hypothesis appears to predict the observed problems qualitatively. There is broad experimental support for the hypothesis at each observed step with no currently known exceptions.

Just as there are no betting schemes that allow a person to overcome randomness in a casino, there appear to be no schemes able to overcome randomness using prebiotic processes. We suggest that an unwillingness to acknowledge this has led to the sixty plus years of failure in the field. There is a large body of evidence—essentially all experiments in abiogenesis performed since its inception sixty plus years ago—that appear to be consistent with the hypothesis presented in this paper. Randomization prevails.

https://osf.io/p5nw3/?fbclid=IwAR0vAV5jVQR7Z-IT_S1fQzJQ_fMonIgUW9xvj0quKIOFdgWWwcnzPPStXIc

Muriel Gargaud: Young Sun, Early Earth and the Origins of Life 2012:

Every living being consists of a collection of molecules that are constantly renewed and which appear to coordinate their evolution. We are therefore dealing with organized systems, the emergence of which, perforce, implies a process of self-organization. However, the spontaneous formation of an ordered system from disorder contradicts our everyday experience. We all know that over time, the most beautiful building is inevitably reduced to ruins. In physical or chemical terms, this tendency is expressed as a quantity, entropy, which expresses the degree of disorder in a system. The second law of thermodynamics expresses the idea that the entropy of an isolated system increases, and thus that disorder tends to increase. An isolated chemical system must, therefore, evolve towards an equilibrium state in which the concentration of different chemical species will be determined by their individual energy levels and the laws of statistics. So how could a system that was as disordered as that of the primitive Earth, with an incredible diversity of forms and structures, give rise to life? 


The answer lies in the fact that the process of self-organization, which is linked to the emergence and development of life, concerns only one part of the system. Hence, the formation of an ordered structure in a sub-system will be compensated by an increase in disorder in its environment, such that overall, the entropy does not decrease. That means then that exchanges of energy and matter are the basis of the dynamics of self-organization.

My comment: Since the authors apply methodological naturalism and exclude design a priori, they are left with the only alternative to design, which is self-organization. Mount Improbable is, however, higher to climb, to get life the first go, then keep it going. That implies a paradox: If the inorganic matter had the unbound drive to get self-organized and become alive, why do thermodynamic mechanisms, and evolution, permit life to die? Why does the cycle of self-replication, which had to be fully set up as well right from the beginning, perpetuate life for millennia, if not millions of years, but living organisms die? If the unbound drive of atoms is to self-organize and get alive, why not the unbound drive to KEEP alive? We know, for instance, that turtles live for centuries. If the struggle is for survival, why do not more species steal DNA from other species like bdelloids? why can Glass Sponges live for 15 thousand years, but evolution has not helped us to get so far?   Turritopsis doohmii jellyfish has found a way to cheat death by actually reversing its aging process. If the jellyfish is injured or sick, it returns to its polyp stage over a three-day period, transforming its cells into a younger state that will eventually grow into adulthood all over again. If molecules drive for survival, why have not many more organisms evolved in a convergent manner, and adopted this extraordinary mechanism?

Moreover, the inescapable evolution towards disorder and the state of thermodynamic equilibrium does not predict in any way the duration of the chemical reactions involved, which may occur in a fraction of a second or, on the other hand, over a period that is reckoned in millions of years. The speed of this evolution depends on the dynamics of the reaction (the subject of chemical kinetics) and not on thermodynamics, which only predicts the sense in which it unfolds. In chemistry, it is difficult to envisage self-organization without having recourse to the heterogeneous nature of matter on a microscopic scale, that is to the fact that matter is not indefinitely divisible. If that were the case, how could it form complex structures? It was undoubtedly this type of reasoning that led, in antiquity, certain philosophers, the best known of which remains Democritus, to postulate the existence of atoms as being the basis of matter. The difficulty comes in passing from this microscopic heterogeneity to a single macroscopic entity that involves a coordination in the arrangement or the movement of a multiplicity of atoms or molecules (either within a three-dimensional structure or within an entire organism). The properties that molecules have of associating with one another may give rise to the formation of crystals or other macroscopic structures such as vesicles (such as those that form cellular membranes ) or the micelles of surfactants. Structures that have a dynamical character may also appear through amplification mechanisms that are highly efficient, such as replication or autocatalysis. These mechanisms are at work in what are known as oscillating reactions, which are often considered chemical curiosities, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction . The concentration of certain intermediates then varies until the reagents are exhausted, in a cyclic or stochastic



Last edited by Otangelo on Mon Jun 13, 2022 4:39 am; edited 21 times in total

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This was my introduction discourse in my debate with Leophilius:

Intelligent Design in Abiogenesis? DEBATE | Otangelo Vs Leophilius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1YWZz4-d0&lc=z23zub5o0sznuvfyn04t1aokgo0f1ajzwhxo0vjnxnxpbk0h00410.1594768575517304

The origin of life is widely regarded as one of the most difficult open problems in science.  ‘Bottom-up’ approaches in the laboratory have not generated anything nearly as complex as a living cell. And what has been achieved, is a far cry from the complexity of anything living. The total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life…  undermines the worldview of who wants materialism to be true. But of course, there is always an excuse: Science is working on it. But is it really justified to put hope that one day a materialistic explanation will be found?

David Denton stated:
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 systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.

And Lynn Margulis stated: To go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.

And Eugene Koonin advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics stated:
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. "

And in fact, there are basically just two options to consider: Either life emerged by a lucky accident, spontaneously through self-organization by unguided natural events, or through the direct intervention, creative force, and activity of an intelligent designer. Evolution is not a possible explanation, because evolution depends on DNA replication. Many have claimed that physical necessity could have promoted chemical reactions, which eventually resulted in the emergence of life. The problem here however is, that the genetic sequence that specifies the arrangement of proteins can be of any order, there is no constraint by physical needs.

To understand why random events are not a good explanation, we best have a look at the deepest level, on an atomic scale. Life uses just five nucleobases to make DNA and RNA. Two purines, and three pyrimidines. Purines use two rings with nine atoms, pyrimidines use just one ring with six atoms. Hydrogen bonding between purine and pyrimidine bases is fundamental to the biological functions of nucleic acids, as in the formation of the double-helix structure of DNA. This bonding depends on the selection of the right atoms in the ring structure. Pyrimidine rings consist of six atoms: 4 carbon atoms and 2 nitrogen atoms. Purines have nine atoms forming the ring: 5 carbon atoms and 4 nitrogen atoms.

Remarkably, it is the composition of these atoms that permit that the strength of the hydrogen bond that permits to join the two DNA strands and form Watson–Crick base-pairing, and well-known DNA ladder.  Neither transcription nor translation of the messages encoded in RNA and DNA would be possible if the strength of the bonds had different values. Hence, life, as we understand it today, would not have arisen.

Now, someone could say, that there could be no different composition, and physical constraints and necessity could eventually permit only this specific order and arrangement of the atoms. Now, in a recent science paper from 2019, Scientists explored how many different chemical arrangements of the atoms to make these nucleobases would be possible. Surprisingly, they found well over a million variants.   The remarkable thing is, among the incredible variety of organisms on Earth, these two molecules are essentially the only ones used in life. Why? Are these the only nucleotides that could perform the function of information storage? If not, are they perhaps the best? One might expect that molecules with smaller connected Carbon components should be easier for abiotic chemistry to explore.

According to their scientific analysis, the natural ribosides and deoxyribosides inhabit a fairly redundant ( in other words, superfluous, unnecessary, needless,  and nonminimal region of this space.  This is a remarkable find and implicitly leads to design. There would be no reason why random events would generate complex, rather than simple, and minimal carbon arrangements. Nor is there physical necessity that says that the composition should be so. This is evidence that a directing intelligent agency is the most plausible explanation. The chemistry space is far too vast to select by chance the right finely-tuned functional life-bearing arrangement.

In the mentioned paper, the investigators asked if other, perhaps equally good, or even better genetic systems would be possible.  Their chemical experimentations and studies concluded that the answer is no. Many nearly as good, some equally good, and a few stronger base-pairing analog systems are known. There is no reason why these structures could or would have emerged in this functional complex configuration by random trial and error. There is a complete lack of scientific-materialistic explanations despite decades of attempts to solve the riddle.

What we can see is, that direct intervention, a creative force, the activity of an intelligent agency, a powerful creator, is capable to have the intention and implement the right arrangement of every single atom into functional structures and molecules in a repetitive manner, in the case of DNA, at least 500 thousand nucleotides to store the information to kick-start life, exclusively with four bases, to produce a storage device that uses a genetic code, to store functional, instructional, complex information, functional amino acids, and phospholipids to make membranes, and ultimately, life.  Lucky accidents, the spontaneous self-organization by unguided coincidental events, that drove atoms into self-organization in an orderly manner without external direction, chemical non-biological are incapable and unspecific to arrange atoms into the right order to produce the four classes of building blocks, used in all life forms.

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Biological Cell factories point to set up by intelligent design

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7761

factory portals with fully automated security checkpoints and control ( membrane proteins )
factory compartments ( organelles )
a library index and fully automated information classification, storage, and retrieval program ( chromosomes, and the gene regulatory network )
molecular computers, hardware ( DNA )
software, a language using signs and codes like the alphabet, an instructional blueprint, ( the genetic and over a dozen epigenetic codes )
information retrieval ( RNA polymerase )
transmission ( messenger RNA )
translation ( Ribosome )
signaling ( hormones )
complex machines ( proteins )
taxis ( dynein, kinesin, transport vesicles )
molecular highways ( tubulins, used by dynein and kinesin proteins for molecular transport to various destinations )
tagging programs ( each protein has a tag, which is an amino acid sequence ) informing other molecular transport machines where to transport them.
factory assembly lines ( fatty acid synthase, non-ribosomal peptide synthase )
error check and repair systems  ( exonucleolytic proofreading, strand-directed mismatch repair )
recycling methods ( endocytic recycling )
waste grinders and management  ( Proteasome Garbage Grinders )  
power generating plants ( mitochondria )
power turbines ( ATP synthase )
electric circuits ( the metabolic network )

1. Factory portals - factory compartments - a library index and fully automated information classification systems, storage and retrieval programs - molecular computers - hardware ( DNA )- software, a language using signs and codes like the alphabet, an instructional blueprint - information retrieval - transmission - translation - signaling - the make of complex machines - taxis - transport highways - tagging programs - factory assembly lines - error check and repair systems - recycling methods - waste grinders and management  - power generating plants - power turbines - electric circuits - machines - robots - fully automated manufacturing production lines - transport carriers - turbines - transistors - computers - and factories are always set up by intelligent designers.
2. Science has discovered, that cells are literally chemical nano factories, that operate based on molecular machines, protein robots, kinesin protein carriers, autonomous self-regulated production lines, generate energy through turbines, neuron transistors, and computers.
3. Therefore, with extremely high probability, cell factory complexes containing all those things are the product of an intelligent designer.

Engineering requires an engineer. An artificial cell or minimal cell is an engineered particle that mimics one or many functions of a biological cell. Mimicking a living cell requires engineers. 1
Architecture requires an architect.  Biological Cells demonstrate a complex architectural structure like a factory complex in a building  2
Orchestration requires a director. Gene regulatory networks orchestrate the expression of genes 3
Organization requires an organizer. Cells are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems 4
Programming languages are always set up by programmersGenes together form the master DNA program 5
Translation programs are always set up by translation programmers. 64 Codons of the genetic code are assigned to 20 amino acids during translation in the Ribosome.  6
Communication systems require network engineers. Cells give and receive messages with its environment and with itself. 7
Electrical networks require electrical engineers. Biological cells contain bioelectric circuits 8
Logistics require a logistic specialist. The cytoskeleton and microtubules serve as tracks for motor protein-based intracellular transport 9
Modular organization requires a modular project manager. Proteins and protein complexes organize intracellular interactions into networks of modules 10
Setting up recycling systems require a recycling technician. Cells sort out usable proteins for recycling 11
Setting up power plants requires systems engineers of power plants. Mitochondria are unusual organelles. They act as the power plants of the cell 12
Nanoscale technology requires nano processes, development engineers Living systems use biological nanomotors to build life’s essential molecules—such as DNA and proteins 13
Product planning and control require a production control coordinator. Eukaryotic cells have intricate regulatory control over the production of proteins and their RNA intermediates. 14
Product Quantity and Variant Flexibility control require product management engineers. Cells are extremely good at making products with high robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. 15
Waste disposal and management require a waste logistics manager.   Cells use proteasomes as "garbage disposal," 16
Creating a language requires intelligence. Cells use a remarkable variety of languages and communication methods 17
Creating Instructional information requires intelligent specialistsSoluble cues, cell-cell contact-dependent signals coordinate, encode and transmit regulatory information to instruct single-cell behavior18
Coordination requires a coordinator Circadian clocks are cell-autonomous timing mechanisms that organize and coordinate cell functions in a 24-h periodicity.19
Setting up strategies requires a strategist.    Cells use strategies to minimize energy consumption, by employing a number of common metabolic pathways for a variety of intermediate products before the pathway splits into different final products.  20
Regulation requires a regulator.  Regulatory circuits responsible for the function of individual genes or gene sets are at the lowest regulatory level. Then, there are circuits underlying the functions of cells, tissues, organs, and entire organisms. Endocrine and nervous systems are the regulatory circuits of the highest hierarchical level. 21
Controlling requires intelligence that sets up and programs the automatic control functions. Various cell cycle regulators control the Cell Cycle. 22
Recruiting requires intelligence which instructs autonomous programs how to do it. Proteins are for example recruited to fix DNA lesions. 23
Interpretation and response require intelligence which creates an interpretation program.  Cells monitor, interpret and respond to internal and external cues. 24
Setting up switch mechanisms based on logic gates with on and off states require intelligent setup. DNA binding proteins work based on circuit principles and logic gates 25
Setting up transport highways requires  Transportation Development engineers. Microtubules can act as specific transport roads for the trafficking of signaling factors 26
Controlled factory implosion programming requires an Explosive Safety Specialist Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms. 27

Actions like engineering, architecting, orchestrating, organizing, programming, translating, setting up communication channels, electric networks, logistic networks, organizing modular systems, recycling systems, making power plants in nanoscale dimensions, product planning and control, establishing product quality and variant flexibility, setting up waste disposal and management systems, creating languages and instructional information, coordinating, setting up strategies, regulating, controlling, recruiting, interpreting and responding, setting up switch mechanisms based on logic gates, setting up transport highways and GPS systems, and controlled factory implosion, are ALWAYS and EXCLUSIVELY assigned to the action of intelligent agents. No exceptions

We can conclude, therefore, that biological systems, which cleverly perform all the demanding, multifaceted job activities described above, are most likely due to the set up of an intelligent designer(s). It is extraordinarily unlikely, statistically, and chemically, that blind fortune would be up to the task. Only a master player with foresight guided by superb chemical wisdom, putting all those systems together in a proper way is an explanation that makes sense.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cell
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm2460
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm2428
4. https://flexbooks.ck12.org/cbook/ck-12-biology-flexbook-2.0/section/2.10/primary/lesson/organization-of-cells-bio
5. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-dna-computer-program-makes-you-and-me-20180405/
6. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29870756/
7. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topic/cell-communication-14122659/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549549/
9. https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-cellbio-100818-125149
10. https://www.pnas.org/content/100/3/1128
11. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-cells-recycle-components.html
12. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053590/
13. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Viola_Vogel/publication/23154570_Harnessing_Biological_Motors_to_Engineer_Systems_for_Nanoscale_Transport_and_Assembly/links/551ab0590cf2bb754076cac6/Harnessing-Biological-Motors-to-Engineer-Systems-for-Nanoscale-Transport-and-Assembly.pdf
14. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/eukaryotic-cells-14023963/
15. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2060&context=lkcsb_research
16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3524306/
17. http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/the-remarkable-language-of-cells
18. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/12/eaay5696
19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5057284/
20. http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/msom.1030.0033
21. http://www.bionet.nsc.ru/meeting/bgrs_proceedings/papers/1998/27/index.html
22. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-biology1/chapter/control-of-the-cell-cycle/
23. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1317637/
24. https://europepmc.org/article/med/27856508
25. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4230274/
26. https://jcs.biologists.org/content/126/11/2319
27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Image010



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Origin of life research faces three major problems

Awe-inspiring evidence of design in biochemistry !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zETY76qFzdk

1. The making of the basic building blocks of life, and complexification
At its most fundamental level, life is made of matter. In a putative prebiotic soup or hydrothermal vents, there is the random chaotic floating around of all sorts of chemicals and molecules in an aqueous environment, in non-purified and racemic form. In order to start the trajectory to complexification to get supposed protocells, and continuing, through chemical evolution, getting to a last universal common ancestor, capable of starting self-replication, and evolution, not only would the basic building blocks have to be purified, but also concentrated in sufficient quantity at the building site. The concentration would have to go hand in hand with sorting out molecules that are useless and keeping molecules used in life. There was no such mechanism on the early earth. There would have to be as well an enormously distant and steep trajectory from the prebiotic synthesis of those basic building blocks ( through electric discharges, synthesis on clay, metals, etc ), to the production performed in a superb manner by modern cells, which use extremely complex metabolic pathways, consistent of highly intricate, veritable molecular production lines, full of marvelous molecular machines, driven by energy in the form of ATP molecules, which require carefully crafted energy gradients and awe-inspiring nano energy turbines to be energetically charged, working in a robot-like fashion, producing all chemicals that life needs.  
 
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. 

Further problems arise by the fact that these basic molecules need to polymerize to become information-bearing genomes and proteins with specific functions and come into a functional relationship and interdependence. An organizational structure would have to be established between the domain of information and computation ( the genome and epigenetic information orchestrating gene expression ) and the mechanistic domain, where proteins and enzymes work based on the direction and information flow of the beforementioned blueprint-like information. The puzzle lies with the problem of creating a causal organization, the interrelationship of informational and mechanical aspects into interdependent narratives. One of the challenges of life’s origin is thus to explain how instructional information control systems emerge naturally and spontaneously from mere chemical interactions and start taking over the clever making and control of molecular mechanical dynamics. 
In modern cells, to make proteins, at least 25 unimaginably complex biosyntheses and production-line like manufacturing steps through large multimolecular machines are required. Each step requires exquisitely engineered molecular machines composed of an enormous number of subunits and co-factors, which require the very own processing procedure described, which makes its origin an irreducible  catch22 problem.

2. Randomization of molecules, and the energy problem
Virtually every task performed by living organisms requires energy. Complexification would not get "off the hook" based on thermodynamic considerations.  Maintenance of the low entropy state of living systems requires the persistent infusion of energy, first, to enable the system to maintain its complex organization and resist dissipation toward randomness. But if there even were a trajectory to get the basic building blocks of life prebiotically: 

As Steve Benner noted: Systems, given energy and left to themselves, DEVOLVE to give uselessly complex mixtures, “asphalts”.  the literature reports (to our knowledge) exactly  ZERO CONFIRMED OBSERVATIONS where “replication involving replicable imperfections” (RIRI) evolution emerged spontaneously from a devolving chemical system. it is IMPOSSIBLE for any non-living chemical system to escape devolution to enter into the Darwinian world of the “living”. Such statements of impossibility apply even to macromolecules not assumed to be necessary to start evolution.

Energy flow in non-living systems tends to result in greater disorder among all elements of the system.  The energy transformations of living systems serve primarily to harvest and store the levels of free energy necessary for maintaining the highly ordered structure of the organism and performing the work that living cells carry out. The net effect for living systems, in contrast to that for non-living systems, is to maintain and often increase order at local levels and on microscopic scales. The function of a living organism depends critically on precisely how it is put together. Its component parts function in a coordinated manner, to generate a complex array of emergent properties, both structurally and functionally. The second consequence of biological energy transformations is to create one or more additional microenvironments within the natural environment.  PH, solute composition, and structural complexity of the living cell are maintained at levels different from the extracellular environment because of the autonomous functions carried out by the cell, but not in the abiotic environment surrounding the cell.  There is a dual requirement of living systems: to resist an increase in entropy and to perform work. Both requirements are essential for the definition of a living entity. Any fabrication or machine is, for the time being, at a lower state of entropy than, and in disequilibrium with, its environment. 


3. The information problem
Norbert Weiner - MIT Mathematician - Father of Cybernetics "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day." 
For explaining the origin of life we must also explain the origin of the genetic cipher/translation, from digital ( DNA / mRNA ) to analog ( Protein ), the origin of the epigenetic codes ( modern cells use over 20),  the specified instructional complex codified information contained in each life form's unique DNA and RNA, the origin of the network that orchestrates gene expres​sion( the gene regulatory network) through transcriptional regulation, the origin of the information transmission system, that is the genetic code itself, encoding, transmission, decoding, and translation, and furthermore, the origin of the codes, signaling and information, for correct direction of proteins to the final destination in the cell. When no prescriptive information exists it is impossible for information, languages, and information transmission systems to arise naturally in a mindless world. Instructional Information is more than just matter and independent of its storage medium. Like a language has a sender and a receiver who both understand the message and act according to it, the medium can be of various sorts, like a piece of paper, written on a sand dune, etc.  All communication and data processing, as is also done in the cell, is achieved through the use of symbols. When a computer processes code it has to decode it in order to convert the code into the corresponding action. Hubert P. Yockey wrote: A satisfactory scenario for spontaneous biogenesis requires the generation of “complexity” not “order”. The probability of selecting the right sequence of cytochrome c at random is about 2·1 ×10^65.  Belief in currently accepted scenarios of spontaneous biogenesis is based on faith, contrary to conventional wisdom.

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How Did Life Begin?  By Jack Szostak on June 1, 2018:  A review

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#8140

Following is a classic example of how wellknown scientists with a high reputation author highly deceptive articles in regards to the origin of life, making believe that the solution is right around the corner waiting for science to discover. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He know more than almost anyone else, that the Origin of life is a huge, unsolved problem. And science has not even an explanation of a prebiotic route to the basic building blocks of life.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-life-begin1/

Untangling the origins of organisms will require experiments at the tiniest scales and observations at the vastest

By Jack Szostak on June 1, 2018

JS: Is the existence of life on Earth a lucky fluke or an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature? 
My comment:  Or was it divine creation? Why does JS not include tha possibility as well?

JS: Is it simple for life to emerge on a newly formed planet, or is it the virtually impossible product of a long series of unlikely events?
My comment:  The simplest free-living bacteria is Pelagibacter ubique. It is known to be one of if not the smallest and simplest, self-replicating, and free-living cell.  It has complete biosynthetic pathways for all 20 amino acids.  These organisms get by with about 1,300 genes and 1,308,759 base pairs and code for 1,354 proteins.  If we take a model size of 1,200,000 base pairs, the chance to get the sequence randomly would be 4^1,200,000 or 10^722,000.

JS: Advances in fields as disparate as astronomy, planetary science and chemistry now hold promise that answers to such profound questions may be around the corner. 
My comment:  Nothing could be farther from the truth. Eugene Koonin  writes in his book: The Logic of Chance:  page 351:
" Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure—we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth.

JS: If life turns out to have emerged multiple times in our galaxy, as scientists are hoping to discover, the path to it cannot be so hard. Moreover, if the route from chemistry to biology proves simple to traverse, the universe could be teeming with life.The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has sparked a renaissance in origin-of-life studies. In a stunning surprise, almost all the newly discovered solar systems look very different from our own. Does that mean something about our own, very odd, system favors the emergence of life? Detecting signs of life on a planet orbiting a distant star is not going to be easy, but the technology for teasing out subtle “biosignatures” is developing so rapidly that with luck we may see distant life within one or two decades.
My comment: False again. Exotic Life Sites: The Feasibility of Far-Out Habitats
The data demonstrate that the probability of finding even one planet with the capacity to support life falls short of one chance in 10^140 (that number is 1 followed by 140 zeros)
https://reasons.org/explore/publications/facts-for-faith/read/facts-for-faith/2001/10/01/exotic-life-sites-the-feasibility-of-far-out-habitats

JS: To understand how life might begin, we first have to figure out how—and with what ingredients—planets form. A new generation of radio telescopes, notably the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile's Atacama Desert, has provided beautiful images of protoplanetary disks and maps of their chemical composition. This information is inspiring better models of how planets assemble from the dust and gases of a disk. Within our own solar system, the Rosetta mission has visited a comet, and OSIRIS-REx will visit, and even try to return samples from, an asteroid, which might give us the essential inventory of the materials that came together in our planet.
My comment: Again, not true. Stellar evolution and the problem of the ‘first’ stars
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1922-chronology-and-timeline-of-origins-of-the-universe-life-and-biodiversity-the-lack-of-explanatory-power-open-questions-and-refuted-claims-of-naturalism#3212
Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, London, 1984, p. 184-185
The big bang theory holds that the universe began with a single explosion. Yet as can be seen below, an explosion merely throws matter apart, while the big bang has mysteriously produced the opposite effect–with matter clumping together in the form of galaxies.

JS:  Once a planet like our Earth—not too hot and not too cold, not too dry and not too wet—has formed, what chemistry must develop to yield the building blocks of life? In the 1950s the iconic Miller-Urey experiment, which zapped a mixture of water and simple chemicals with electric pulses (to simulate the impact of lightning), demonstrated that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are easy to make.
My comment: Again, false. Not easy to make. At all. I list 27 unsolved problems in regard to the origin of amino acids on the early earth, In regard to prebiotic synthesis of the basic building blocks of life, I list 23 problems directly related to the lack of a selection mechanism on the prebiotic earth. This is  one of the unsolvable problems of abiogenesis.
Selecting the right materials is absolutely essential. But a prebiotic soup of mixtures of impure chemicals would never purify and select those that are required for life.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7759

JS: Other molecules of life turned out to be harder to synthesize, however, and it is now apparent that we need to completely reimagine the path from chemistry to life. The central reason hinges on the versatility of RNA, a very long molecule that plays a multitude of essential roles in all existing forms of life. RNA can not only act like an enzyme, it can also store and transmit information. Remarkably, all the protein in all organisms is made by the catalytic activity of the RNA component of the ribosome, the cellular machine that reads genetic information and makes protein molecules. This observation suggests that RNA dominated an early stage in the evolution of life.
My comment: It takes ribosomes to make ribosomes. How did everything start?  The ribosome, both looking at the past and at the future, is a very significant structure — it's the most complicated thing that is present in all organisms.  if we take all the life forms we have so far,  the minimum for the ribosome about 53 proteins and 3 polynucleotides.  And that is the kind of already reaching a plateau where adding more genomes doesn't reduce that number of proteins. Thats called irreducible complexity. ( A dialogue between Craig Venter, and George Church )
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1661-translation-through-ribosomes-amazing-nano-machines

JS:  Today the question of how chemistry on the infant Earth gave rise to RNA and to RNA-based cells is the central question of origin-of-life research. Some scientists think that life originally used simpler molecules and only later evolved RNA.
My comment: Here, JS, implicitly suggests, that RNA's would be the product of evolution. But there was no evolution in action at this stage. He admits that elswere:
The role of natural selection in the origin of life
Unlike living systems that are products of and participants in evolution, these prebiotic chemical structures were not products of evolution. Not being yet intricately organized, they could have emerged as a result of ordinary physical and chemical processes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20407927

JS: Other researchers, however, are tackling the origin of RNA head-on, and exciting new ideas are revolutionizing this once quiet backwater of chemical research. Favored geochemical scenarios involve volcanic regions or impact craters, with complex organic chemistry, multiple sources of energy, and dynamic light-dark, hot-cold and wet-dry cycles. Strikingly, many of the chemical intermediates on the way to RNA crystallize out of reaction mixtures, self-purifying and potentially accumulating on the early Earth as organic minerals—reservoirs of material waiting to come to life when conditions change.
My comment: Genetic takeover, Cairns Smith, page 66:
Now you may say that there are alternative ways of building up nucleotides, and perhaps there was some geochemical way on the early Earth. But what we know of the experimental difficulties in nucleotide synthesis speaks strongly against any such supposition. However it is to be put together, a nucleotide is too complex and metastable a molecule for there to be any reason to expect an easy synthesis.

If you were to consider in more detail a process such as the purification of an intermediate ( to form amide bonds between amino acids and nucleotides ) you would find many subsidiary operations — washings, pH changes and so on. (Remember Merrifield’s machine: for one overall reaction, making one peptide bond, there were about 90 distinct operations required.)

JS: Assuming that key problem is solved, we will still need to understand how RNA was replicated within the first primitive cells. Researchers are just beginning to identify the sources of chemical energy that could enable the RNA to copy itself, but much remains to be done. If these hurdles can also be overcome, we may be able to build replicating, evolving RNA-based cells in the laboratory—recapitulating a possible route to the origin of life.
My comment:  Koonin, the logic of chance: 2012
All this progress notwithstanding, the ribozyme polymerases that are currently available are a far cry from processive, sufficiently accurate (in terms of the Eigen threshold) replicases, capable of catalyzing the replication of exogenous templates and themselves. Thirty years ago, no catalytic activity was reported for any RNA molecule to catalyze any reaction at all; now we are aware of dozens of ribozyme activities, including some, such as highly efficient aminoacylation, that get the translation system going. However, this is about all the good news; the rest is more like a sobering cold shower.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2234-the-origin-of-replication-and-translation-and-the-rna-world

What next? Chemists are already asking whether our kind of life can be generated only through a single plausible pathway or whether multiple routes might lead from simple chemistry to RNA-based life and on to modern biology. Others are exploring variations on the chemistry of life, seeking clues as to the possible diversity of life “out there” in the universe. If all goes well, we will eventually learn how robust the transition from chemistry to biology is and therefore whether the universe is full of life-forms or—but for us—sterile.



Abiogenesis: An unsolved mystery is not evidence of a creator
https://thelogicofscience.com/2017/06/05/abiogenesis-an-unsolved-mystery-is-not-evidence-of-a-creator/

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To bake a cake, the right procedure has to be applied. So as well, in order to make the basic building blocks of life

A. G. CAIRNS-SMITH genetic takeover, page54

The impurity problem:
First of all there is a problem which is seldom discussed. The starting monomers would have been grossly impure. On the basis of Simulation experiments they would have been present in complex mixtures that contained a great variety of variously reactive molecules. N0 sensible organic chemist would hope to get much out of a reaction from starting materials that were tars containing the reactants as minor constituents.

To bake the cake:
In organic chemistry it is often the work-up rather than the reaction that causes most of the trouble. Think about the techniques that are used: pH adjustments, solvent extractions, chromatography, evaporation to dryness, recrystallization, filtration and so on. Now you can say that such things might have taken place fortuitously under primitive geological conditions. Each individual operation can be imagined — a transfer of a solution, a washing of a precipitate, an evaporation, and so on. But very many such operations would have had to take place consistently and in the right order. In a typical work-up procedure there are subtle things that can make the difference between success and mess — how long to wait, say, after the pH adjustment before filtering. Practical organic chemistry is not easy. Very much has to be engineered. It is not sensible to suppose that an uninformed geochemistry would fortuitously be an expert in such things.

The concentration problem:
Next there is the problem of the concentrations of the monomers in primordial waters. It has been emphasized repeatedly that the idea of an oceanic primordial soup is difficult to sustain on thermodynamic and kinetic grounds. For example Hull (1960) says: ‘First, thermodynamic calculations predict vanishingly small concentrations of even the smallest organic compounds. Second, the reactions invoked to synthesize such compounds are seen to be much more effective in decomposition.’ Hull was discussing particularly the effects of ultraviolet radiation which he calculated would have destroyed 97 3/", of amino acids produced in the atmosphere before they reached the oceans.

The condensation problem: 
There is a third difficulty in prevital synthesis of biopolymers, and this is the most generally recognized: all the major biopolymers are metastable in aqueous solution in relation to their (deactivated) monomers. Left to itself in water, a polypeptide will hydrolyze to its constituent amino acids. 

Perhaps there is some other way of making peptides with more or less specified amino acid sequences; and perhaps this way does not need detailed control. Perhaps it could then have operated before there was life
on Earth, before that engineer, natural selection, appeared on the scene. But it is difficult to see how this could have been so. I think we would know by now if there was some much easier way. It is similarly difficult to imagine anything like polysaccharide being accumulated in primordial waters. As we saw, the monosaccharides could only have been made easily from formaldehyde, as far as anyone knows, and there is doubt if there could have been sufficient concentrations of that. In any case, as we saw, the product of the formose reaction is a very complex mixture that easily leads to higher polymers and to caramel.



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Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Curren10

Current central questions in origin of life (OoL) research.
In order to find answers, each of the natural sciences illustrated has to play a role by converting these questions into hypotheses and theories, while constantly testing them experimentally. The fundamental roles of philosophy, mathematics and informatics are portrayed in the background.

Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Timeli11
Abiogenesis is mathematically  impossible Timeli10
Timeline of recent multidisciplinary achievements that build bridges in OoL research.
Included are examples from the past 10 years of OoL research that bridge disciplines, approaches and/or methods, biomolecules/single-world scenarios, simulations and experiments. The choice of studies does not aim to cover (exclusively) novel findings, but those that build bridges.


1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151616/

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Robert P. Bywater On dating stages in prebiotic chemical evolution 15 February 2012
Despite the wide repertoire of chemical and biological properties of RNA, which make it such an appealing contender for being the first type of molecular species to usher in life onto this planet, there is no explanation for how such a complex chemical species could have arisen in the absence of sophisticated chemical machinery. The generation of complex chemicals require many millions of cycles of synthesis, partial degradation, concentration, selection and reannealing in combinatorially new ways such that sufficiently diverse species could be produced and reproduced, from which particularly suitable entities survived 34

The following list of essential requirements is deemed to be necessary. 

(1) Catalytic activity, to accelerate synthetic reactions for needed products and in order to compensate for degradation processes. 
(2) Energy supply and management. 
(3) Storage system for synthesized products. 
(4) Controlled material transport across cell membranes. 
(5) Communication between the cell interior and the outside world. 
(6) Molecular recognition and selectivity/ affinity. 
(7) Replication of molecular species and ultimately of entire cells.

These are in turn catered for, in the prebiotic world, in the following way. 
(1) Catalytic material abounds in the mineral world, and while these catalysts do not possess the efficiency and selectivity of enzymes or ribozymes, they would be sufficient, during the eons of time that we are considering, for catalyzing the synthetic pathways to the earliest prebiotic chemicals. It is known that primitive metal ion catalysts were abundant on the early Earth. In our model, the first key synthetic steps were purported to take place on tidal beaches where there are myriads of catalytic particles. We are of course aware of other hypotheses whereby libraries of potential prebiotic compounds could have been produced by deep-sea vents or delivered from space . Both would have access to adequate energy sources and catalytic functions but both also lack key functions such as concentration, cyclical segregation, renewed mixing and combinatorial synthesis that the beach model provides

(2) Energy supplies were abundant—solar, geothermal, cosmic and terrestrial radiation, etc. In particular, the conflict between the thermodynamical imperatives, which require a drive towards increased entropy, and the need for living systems for the accumulation of order and reduced entropy must be considered. Energy must be consumed in order to favour the latter. 

(3) The importance of lipids has been stressed by several authors and we have also made a case for this. The protocells referred to above played a key role in all of this. Further, it is not only the space enclosed by the lipid bilayer that is important for storage but, even more importantly, the lipid bilayer itself, especially since many of the early biochemicals would have been lipophilic in nature. 

(4) The lipid bilayer presents a barrier to material transport, but there are mechanisms of passive transport that could easily operate, both peptide channel-based and diffusive. Active transport would be a much later development. 

(5) Communications across membranes can be accomplished through material transport, but more importantly for the development of future communication systems in a cellular world is the development of signal transduction mechanisms. These are taken care of by assemblies of transmembrane peptides recognition really has a chance to flourish. 

(7) Replication is of course an absolute requirement of biological systems and their potential for development and evolution. Obviously, RNA fulfills most of the requirements for this admirably, but as has been stated already, there was no RNA at the earliest stages

It is proposed here that as a first approximation, the order in which these organic compounds begin to appear depends on their molecular complexity and to the thermodynamics of their formation. Of course, the formation of any given compound depends on the nature and concentration of precursors, but these in turn will owe their existence to complexity-dependent natural-synthetic processes. This ordering suggests a time when they could have appeared on Earth, the dating scheme referred to in the “Introduction”. In regard to the seventh of the above-named functionalities, the replication issue, it has been stated that OoL could have got underway without templatebased replication.

Molecular complexity
Experiments and theoretical considerations have directed attention towards a collection of candidate chemicals that could have been produced prebiotically, and that these later, in various combinations, could react in ways that generated molecular species of ever-increasing complexity, the reactions being powered by solar and geothermal energy and radiation. This collection of chemicals would have to include some lipids, of sufficient complexity to be able to form the protocells referred to above. In addition, peptides would form that can assemble inside the enveloping membranes of these protocells and exert some of the key functions that will ultimately be required by more advanced living systems. The conditions that were needed to support the synthesis of the necessary organic chemicals were adequate for the production of the simplest peptides and lipids—energy sources and catalysts already referred to—and a feedstock of simple chemicals. In order to be able to estimate how early a given compound could have been produced, and to order these on a timescale, it is necessary to quantify this concept of “simplest”. In this work, this is done by defining molecular complexity according to a chemoinformatic score of information content based on Shannon entropy (see “Methods”). In the present case, several more complex and more recent compounds have been added. According to this complexity score, 12 of the now 20 natural (i.e. in the biology of today) amino acid types would have been produced early on, prebiotically. These are shown in Table 1. A cutoff of 100 defines this “minimal set”. This may seem arbitrary, but there are several other criteria that have been published elsewhere that lend support to this selection. In particular, it was stated by Miller: "Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids." These 11 are included in the 12 identified here. (Of course, there could have been other amino acid types that have not survived.. One particularly significant feature of this minimal subset is that the majority of its members are hydrophobic in character, consistent with their preference for lipid-rich media and conducive o a propensity to populate polypeptides that are embedded in lipid. This observation led to the notion of a “transmembrane-peptide-first” model for OoL, but this would only earn any credence if the membrane-spanning peptides could exert useful biological functions. This is precisely what they can do (i.e. the fourth, fifth, sixth and even seventh of the above-defined functions). This emphasis on membrane-spanning peptides presupposes a supply of membranes and these are in turn based on lipids which would result from esterification (or etherification) of glycerol by fatty acids of various chain lengths (reckoned here as the number of methylenes), typically up to 17. The chemicals required to make up phospholipids (such as are found in lipid bilayers) are also “simple” by the criteria applied here (complexity score 95 and 121 for typical alkyl chain precursors, 116 for glycerol phosphate). To construct a phospholipid comparable to those in typical “modern” membranes requires the production of relatively complex molecules (score 551) but the lipids lining the earliest protocells would have been much simpler.

Fitting complexity scores to a timescale
The classical Miller experiment suggests that the simplest precursors to biomolecules could have been produced very early on, but it is surmised that more complex molecules will take more time to be generated in the first place and later to accumulate in sufficient quantities and concentrations, and then to evolve into further new species. The hypothesis presented here is that the emergence of these more complex species is dependent on molecular complexity. The minimal set of amino acids would have been produced very quickly and be present in some abundance. Lipid precursors and pyrimidine and purines (nucleobases) would also have been produced early on. But nucleobases on their own have no functions that are useful for replication; they need to be integrated into a polymeric structure. At some point a ribose-phosphate backbone became the favoured construct for this, but it can be seen that the nucleotides needed to form these polynucleotides are now ~4 times more complex than their parent nucleobases by virtue of the need to append ribose and phosphate onto them. In fact, it is very unlikely that nucleotides were ever produced in this way. While it is easy to sketch plausible synthetic pathways for the peptides, sugars and lipids and even for nucleobases, and indeed, these compounds are produced experimentally in systems designed to mimic the chemistry of the early Earth, it is not immediately obvious how nucleotides could be correctly assembled. It is unlikely that the nucleoside could be formed from the corresponding nucleobase correctly connected to a ribose moiety without the aid of a sophisticated catalyst. An interesting and highly plausible, synthetic path has been proposed. This is a very novel idea that nucleotides developed not from nucleobases, but rather, from ribose. The compounds in the proposed synthetic pathway to nucleotides from arabinose aminooxazolines via arabinose anhydronucleoside (“Product_2”) to an activated ribonucleotide β- ribocytidine-2′,3′-cyclic phosphate (“Product_3”) have complexity scores that increase as one proceeds from a ribose-based structure to a nucleotide-like structure, as one would expect, and these scores are in themselves very much in line with the scores for ribose phosphate itself and nucleotides, respectively. This is of course encouraging, but we have to compare polypeptides with RNA. The heavy burden, chemoinformatically speaking, of producing a full coding sequence for a given polypeptide or small protein becomes clear when one considers the complexity scores shown in Tables 3 and 4. Scores for both RNA and its corresponding DNA are given and they are clearly much larger compared to the polypeptide/protein they code for. It has to be remembered that the genetic code for proteins is a triplet code, but in practice, this means that for every amino acid residue there are six nucleobases, since DNA has to exist in a duplex ( +/- strand ) form. The consequences of this are very clearly seen in the enormously large values for complexity in the DNAcoding regions for (Ile)25 (Table 3) and crambin (Table 4), respectively. These complexity scores are of course related to how proteins are coded for “today” and do not take into account, nor preclude, that there could have been an “RNA world” without the need for DNA duplex structures. Still, RNA as such would be very much more complex than the proteins that it codes for, and therefore be a later arrival than oligopeptide and even some small proteins. 


RNA has been held to reign supreme in the OoL research world despite the need to explain the complexity, how it is synthesized in the first place, how it can be protected (during synthesis and certainly afterwards) from degradation and dilution in the oceans. These objections have never been satisfactorily defended. 

It remains the case that RNA is, with good reason, credited with many attributes that are essential for the maintenance of life. Principles among these are catalytic activity (“ribozyme”) and the replication function. As far as the former is concerned, there is nothing unique about that function in itself and examples of ribozyme activity are not common in the modern world. They operate when they are needed as in ribosomes. The appearance of the oldest living organisms on Earth— cyanobacteria as found in stromatolites—has been estimated to have taken place 3.5 Gyrs ago. This is 0.7 Gyrs after the earliest time for anything resembling life to have emerged, at the transition from the Hadean to the Archaean era. Doublestranded DNA (complexity ~322,100 for a small protein) must have been in place before that time, so we can at least put that as a lower limit. It is known that the moon is receding, so it is not strictly correct to assume a linear timescale for, e.g. the evolution of complexity. But over a restricted period, if this assumption can be allowed, then it is possible to give approximate times for the appearance of different types of compounds. Starting from the simpler substances (complexity ~100) that were in abundance 4.2 Gyr ago to duplex DNA at 3.5 Gyrs ago, we can, by interpolation, put the time of appearance of phospholipids (complexity ~550) at 1.2 Myr, a transmembrane peptide (~3,800) 8.3 Myr, a small protein (~6,500) 14 Myr and its corresponding RNA (~143,000) at 0.31 Gyr. Thus, the “RNA world” would have started about 3.9 Gyrs ago and then from 3.5 Gyrs the emergence of duplex DNA would start to take place.

Evolution of lipid structures
According to the complexity-based timescale being proposed here, the earliest lipids would have emerged at about the same time as the simplest amino acids, glycerol etc.. The presence of lipids leads to the formation of vesicles which are generally accepted as being critical. Ultimately, there would emerge complex lipids similar to “modern” lipids based on derivatives of phosphoglyceryl esters (and ethers) for example. But much simpler lipid-like molecules such as long-chain alcohols can also form vesicles. It is clear that this represents an important early stage in the steady evolution of ever more complex systems. This in turn exerts constraints on which oligopeptides emerged first. For example, in lipid vesicles made of only alcohols there would not be any way, at least under pH conditions close to neutral, to accommodate helical oligopeptides containing lysine. The complexity of, e.g. heptadecanol would be comparable to that of the very simplest amino acid types. This would have affected the very earliest expressions of peptide evolution and by no means invalidates the argument outlined above.

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Dose, Klaus, "The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, p.348.
"More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. New lines of thinking and experimentation must be tried."

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. 

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?

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?

PIER LUIGI LUISI: The Origin of Life on Earth An unsolved problem or a mystery? 23 OCTOBER 2016
https://wsimag.com/science-and-technology/21279-the-origin-of-life-on-earth
Who or what made this highly ordered state? Obviously there must be a preliminary mechanism, a black box, capable to make such ordered macromolecules. This black box, I call “origin of life”. Seriously, consider that you cannot be asking how life arises from non-life, and start with sequentially well ordered macromolecules- or viruses or viroid.

Opinion: Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning

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.

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

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe
From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information cannot in our view be generated by what are often called 'natural' processes, as for instance through meteorological and chemical processes. . . Information was also needed. We have argued that the requisite information came from an 'intelligence'.
Evolution from Space (1981), p. 148, 150

Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
"It is quite a shock. From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it.  I now find myself driven to this position by logic. There is no other way in which we can understand the precise ordering of the chemicals of life except to invoke the creations on a cosmic scale. . . .  We were hoping as scientists that there would be a way round our conclusion, but there isn't.
"There Must Be A God," Daily Express, Aug. 14, 1981 and Hoyle on Evolution, Nature, Nov. 12, 1981, p. 105

Carl Sagan, astronomer, "Life," in 10 Encyclopedia Britannica: Macromedia, 15th ed.
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974), 893-894:

A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frenetic activity. On a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an enormous rate. . . . The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

What if I told you, I believed it possible (not probable but possible) that a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia could come together without assistance from intelligence given enough time in the universe. Would you think me to be a logical person?

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Eörs Szathmáry  Toward major evolutionary transitions theory 2.0  April 2, 2015
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10104
Origins of Life: Three Early Phases of Transitions to Cells
Progress about the origins of life has been considerable although the nut is still hard to crack. New experiments and theoretical insights have been generated, but, equally important, we now have a much better understanding of what we do not understand (moving from “unknown unknowns” to “known unknowns”).

The Origin of the First Hereditary Replicators.
This process is still an unsolved problem. By itself, this transition is not an evolutionary one because, without hereditary replicators, no Darwinian evolution is possible. However, we have to consider the gray zone where chemistry and evolution had the first overlap. As Orgel noted: “All replicating systems are, by definition, autocatalytic and all autocatalytic systems result, in some sense, in replication” (ref. 25, p. 203). Transition theory has adopted this view throughout the years, which also led to a new way of classifying replicators. 

There is a possibility that autocatalytic macromolecular networks without template replication could exist. Imagine a network of peptides in which some peptides can catalyze the formation of other peptides from amino acids and simpler peptides. Recent calculations show that the probability of formation is higher than previously thought and that there is limited evolvability, provided that reflexively autocatalytic networks are compartmentalized. This option is also compatible with the view that the RNA world may have never been clean and that amino acids and peptides played some important role in the beginning: for example, in the handling of membrane permeability.

There is ample evidence supporting the view that the RNA world in fact existed, but many agree that it may not have been the earliest genetic system, because of difficulties with its origin. Despite recent progress, we still have no general RNA-based replicase that could replicate a great variety of sequences, including copies of its own. I briefly consider novel issues in turn. A potential way out of the missing RNA replicase problem could be a network in which two types of ribozymes act together: replicases replicate short strands that would be linked by ligases. Both ligases and replicases would form in this way. Template effects are important, and the system as a whole is collectively autocatalytic. We have nice examples of a ligase-based anabolic autocatalytic system and a collectively autocatalytic set of minimalist nucleic acid replicators.

The Error Threshold of Molecular Replication and the Maintenance of Integrated Information.
Once RNA genes could be mechanistically replicated one way or another, a first appearance of intragenomic conflict arises due to Eigen’s error threshold. Limited replication accuracy in early systems would have allowed the maintenance by selection of single genes only that in turn would have competed with each other.

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A response:

Antonio Lazcano ( AL): ......and that because of our work with the possibility of having an RNA world in the very earliest stages of evolution, we did have the, also the intellectual understanding of the genetics, the structure, the evolution of RNA systems.
Reply:  Graham Cairns-Smith: The odds against a successful unguided synthesis of a batch of primed nucleotide on the primitive Earth would be a huge number, represented approximately by a 1 followed by 109 zeros ( 10^109). 'The odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them.'

RNA & DNA: It's prebiotic synthesis: Impossible !!
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2865-rna-dna-it-s-prebiotic-synthesis-impossible

1. No prebiotic mechanism is known to select: 
- Right-handed configurations of RNA and DNA
- The right backbone sugar
- How to get size complementarity of the nucleotide bases to form a DNA strand and strands of the DNA molecule running in the opposite directions

2. Bringing all the parts together and joining them in the right position 
- Attach the nucleic bases to the ribose and in a repetitive manner at the same, correct place, and the backbone being a repetitive homopolymer
- Prebiotic glycosidic bond formation between nucleosides and the base
- Prebiotic phosphodiester bond formation
- Fine-tuning of the strength of the hydrogen base pairing forces

3. The instability, degradation, and asphalt problem 
- Bonds that are thermodynamically unstable in water, and overall intrinsic instability. RNA’s nucleotide building blocks degrade at warm temperatures in time periods ranging from nineteen days to twelve years. These extremely short survival rates for the four RNA nucleotide building blocks suggest why life’s origin would have to be virtually instantaneous—all the necessary RNA molecules would have to be assembled before any of the nucleotide building blocks decayed.

4. The energy problem
- Doing things costs energy. There has to be a ready source of energy to produce RNA. In modern cells, energy is consumed to make RNA.

5. The minimal nucleotide quantity problem.
- The prebiotic conditions would have had to be right for reactions to give perceptible yields of bases that could pair with each other.

6. The Water Paradox  
- The hydrolytic deamination of DNA and RNA nucleobases is rapid and irreversible, as is the base-catalyzed cleavage of RNA in water. This leads to a paradox: RNA requires water to do its job, but RNA cannot emerge in water and cannot replicate with sufficient fidelity in water without sophisticated repair mechanisms in place.

7.The transition problem from prebiotic to biochemical synthesis 
- Even if all this in a freaky accident occurred by random events, that still says nothing about the huge gap and enormous transition that would be still ahead to arrive at a fully functional interlocked and interdependent metabolic network, where complex biosynthesis pathways produce nucleotides in modern cells.

AL: If you simulate the conditions of the primitive word you can actually synthesize in a very rapid time, in a very quick interval of time, you can synthesize amino acids, hydroxides, and so on, thus proving that in principle you could have those organic molecules in the primitive world prior to the origins of life.
Reply: Paradoxes in the origin of life. 2015 Jan 22 Benner SA1.
http://sci-hub.ren/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25608919

We are now 60 years into the modern era of prebiotic chemistry. That era has produced tens of thousands of papers attempting to define processes by which “molecules that look like biology” might arise from “molecules that do not look like biology” …. For the most part, these papers report “success” in the sense that those papers define the term…. And yet, the problem remains unsolved

Chemical evolution of amino acids and proteins ? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L1MfGrtk0A

AL: of people with an extraordinary insight, became fully aware that if you want to have enzyme catalytic activity you require coenzymes and most of the coins are actually ribonucleotide derivatives.
Reply: Synthesis of Coenzyme A
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2691-synthesis-of-coenzyme-a
In all living organisms, coenzyme A is synthesized in a five-step process that requires four molecules of ATP, pantothenate and cysteine.

It takes enzymes to make co-enzyme A. But you require to Coenzyme A to have enzyme catalytic activity.  What came first?

Compounds that have no explanation at all how they could have been synthesized prebiotically
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2841-compounds-that-have-no-explanation-at-all-how-they-could-have-been-synthesized-prebiotically

Coenzymes are essential across all domains of life. B vitamins (B1-thiamin, B2- riboflavin, B3-niacin, B5-pantothenate, B6-pyridoxine, B7-biotin, and B12-cobalamin) represent the largest class of coenzymes, which participate in a diverse set of reactions including C1-rearrangements, DNA repair, electron transfer, and fatty acid synthesis.

Consider in special the ENORMOUS problem to get Vitamin B12 prebiotically, which is required in DNA synthesis:

Anaerobic Vitamin B12 ( cobalamin ) synthesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2974-anaerobic-vitamin-b12-cobalamin-synthesis

Folic acid or folate does not occur in nature.

Elucidation of the anaerobic pathway for the corrin component of cobalamin (vitamin B12) September 10, 2013
https://www.pnas.org/content/110/37/14906
The anaerobic route has remained enigmatic because many of its intermediates have proven technically challenging to isolate, because of their inherent instability. The full step-by-step in vitro synthesis of cobyrinic acid from ALA requires 14 enzymes

Nearly all animal life is dependent on bacteria for survival as only bacteria and some archaea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, and provide it through the food chain. 1 Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is a water-soluble vitamin involved in the metabolism of every cell of the human body. It is one of eight B vitamins. It is a cofactor in DNA synthesis, and in both fatty acid and amino acid metabolism. 

AL: Then in 1960, 1961 RNA was able to synthesize adenine. So you could demonstrate that in the primitive conditions, prebiotic chemistry could lead to the formation of some of the components of DNA and RNA.
Reply: That does not correspond to the facts. There are still at least 27 relevant, unanswered questions today in regards of prebiotic synthesis of RNA and DNA:

Open questions in prebiotic chemistry to explain the origin of the four basic building blocks of life
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279p75-abiogenesis-is-mathematically-impossible#7759


AL: We believe that proteins are actually the outcome of evolution of an RNA world, interacting with amino acid,
Reply:  There are many problems with this scenario:

The problem of the origin of the hardware and software in the cell is far greater than commonly appreciated
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2997-the-problem-of-the-origin-of-the-hardware-and-software-in-the-cell-is-far-greater-than-commonly-appreciated

- Getting the basic elements to make the building blocks of life
- RNA world
- RNA and DNA synthesis
- Polymerization through catalysts on clay
- The Eigen threshold
- The transition from the RNA world, to the DNA world
- Obtaining the genetic Code
- The genetic code is optimal amongst 1 million
- The second, overlapping code in DNA
- The amazing information storage capacity of DNA
- Getting the information in the genome
- Getting the gene expression machinery to make proteins
- Origin of the 37 gene codes: Did they evolve?

AL: Well, we have the demonstration by crystallography and this comes from the work of Lauren Williams and his friends, my colleagues at Georgia Tech, that if you look at the catalytic side of the large subunit of a ribosome,
you don't have any proteins in the actual place where the peptide bond is being synthesized.
Reply:  The Ribosomal Peptidyl Transferase Center: Structure, Function, Evolution, Inhibition
https://geneticacomportamento.ufsc.br/files/2013/08/Polacek05-Ribozima-peptidil-transferase.pdf
The distinctive features of the modern ribosome are its mammoth size and enormous structural complexity. The molecular weight of the ribosome exceeds 2.5 million daltons and the particle comprises at least three large rRNA molecules and more than 50 different ribosomal proteins. It is unimaginable that the ribosome, which contains rRNAs of thousands of nucleotides in length, evolved in a single evolutionary step.

Peptide Bond Formation Mechanism Catalyzed by Ribosome
https://sci-hub.st/https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/ra/c5ra02767e#!divAbstract
By using an atomic mutagenesis approach to investigate all the 23S rRNA residues that compose the inner core of the peptidyl transferase centerwe identified a single functional group with crucial importance for peptide bond catalysis— namely, the ribose 20'-OH at A2451. This ribose 20 group needs to maintain hydrogen donor characteristics in order to promote effective amide bond formation.

Evidently, the positioning of all substrates, transition states, and ribosomal residues contributing to the concerted redistribution of charges must be tightly controlled to achieve efficient transpeptidation compatible with the observed in vivo rates of amino acid polymerization of about 20 s–1.

My comment: A precise, minutely orchestrated arrangement of just two main players,  the interaction of ribose 2'-OH at position A2451 , and the 2’ hydroxyl of the P site substrate A76  are pivotal in orienting substrates in the active site for optimal catalysis, and play a key role in polypeptide bond formation. The ribosome promotes the reaction of the amino acid condensation by properly orienting the reaction substrates. Key in the reaction is the presence of a proton shuttling group.  The observed 100-fold reduction in the reaction rate by mutation of P-site A76 20-OH group  is indication of this group's activity during the peptidyl transfer reaction.
There is no way, that such precision could have emerged by unguided prebiotic non-intelligent mechanisms. That is not an argument from ignorance or incredulity, but the fact that randomness has an extreme limit, basically neglectable, to bring forward such a highly orchestrated, precise, engineered, coordinated, and controlled process.  

In the upper part of the tunnel, results suggest that A2062 and A2451 can communicate in both directions for translation stalling, mostly through dynamically coupled C2063, C2064, and A2450.

My comment:  This is truly awe-inspiring. The functional group A2451, which is not only of crucial importance as described above for peptyde bond catalysis, but when the translation process is stalled, it signals to a dynamically coupled group in the exit tunnel of the product, the polypeptide chain: " we have a problem here", 

AL: If you want to have RNA, you know that you need ribonucleotides, the ribonucleotides are synthesized here , but is essentially the same pathway, biochemical pathway, metabolic pathway, in all living entities that we have studied so far.
Reply: True, but how did these extremely sophisticated and regulated pathways emerge prebiotically?

The DNA double helix, evidence of design
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2028-biosynthesis-of-the-dna-double-helix-evidence-of-design

The trajectory from a prebiotic synthesis of the basic building blocks of life, to the sophisticated synthesis by cell factories: an unsolved riddle
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2894-prevital-unguided-origin-of-the-four-basic-building-blocks-of-life-impossible#7650

Nucleotides
Folate is necessary for the production and maintenance of new cells , for DNA synthesis  and RNA synthesis  through methylation . The synthesis of NADPH requires six enzymes5 Six proteins are required in the folate pathway. 4 

RNA 
Nucleotides are building blocks for DNA and RNA. Three Pyrimidines and Two Purines Are Commonly Found in Cells.
The pyrimidine synthesis pathway requires six regulated steps, seven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP.
The starting material for purine biosynthesis is Ribose 5-phosphate, a product of the highly complex pentose phosphate pathway, which uses 12 enzymes1 
De novo purine synthesis pathway requires ten regulated steps, eleven enzymes, and energy in the form of ATP. 

DNA
The replacement of RNA as the repository of genetic information by its more stable cousin, DNA, provides a more reliable way of transmitting information. DNA uses thymine (T) as one of its four informational bases, whereas RNA uses uracil (U)
At the C2' position of ribose, an oxygen atom is removed. The remarkable enzymes that do this are named Ribonucleotide reductases (RNR) The iron-dependent enzyme is essential for DNA synthesis, and most essential enzymes of life 32 , and it has one of the most sophisticated allosteric regulations known today. 50  
The thymine-uracil exchange constitutes one of the major chemical differences between DNA and RNA. Before being incorporated into the chromosomes, this essential modification takes place. Uracil bases in RNA are transformed into thymine bases in DNA. The synthesis of thymine requires seven enzymesDe novo biosynthesis of thymine is an intricate and energetically expensive process. 
All in all, not considering the metabolic pathways and enzymes required to make the precursors to start RNA and DNA synthesis requires at least 26  enzymes.  

1. On the one side, we have the putative prebiotic soup with the random chaotic floating around of the basic building blocks of life, and on the other side,  the first living self-replicating cell ( LUCA ), a supposed fully operational minimal self-replicating cell, using the highly specific and sophisticated molecular milieu with a large team of enzymes which catalyze the reactions to produce the four basic building blocks of life in a cooperative manner, and furthermore, able to maintain intracellular homeostasis, reproduce, obtaining energy and converting it into a usable form, getting rid of toxic waste, protecting itself from dangers of the environment, doing the cellular repair, and communicate.  
2. The science paper: Structural analyses of a hypothetical minimal metabolism proposes a minimal number of 50 enzymatic steps catalyzed by the associated encoded proteins. They don't, however, include the steps to synthesize the 20 amino acids required in life. Including those, the minimal metabolome would consist of 221 enzymes & proteins. A large number of molecular machines, co-factors, scaffold proteins, and chaperones are not included, required to build this highly sophisticated chemical factory.
3. There simply no feasible viable prebiotic route to go from a random prebiotic soup to this minimal proteome to kick-start metabolism by unguided means. This is not a conclusion by ignorance & incredulity, but it is reasonable to be skeptic, that this irreducibly complex biological system, entire factory complexes composed of myriads of interconnected highly optimized production lines, full of computers and robots could emerge naturally defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of random unguided events and physical necessity. Comparing the two competing hypotheses, chance vs intelligent design, the second is simply by far the more case-adequate & reasonable explanation.  

AL: If we want to have DNA, we need deoxyribonucleotides. And in absolutely all them entities, if you want to have deoxyribonucleotides, biochemistry needs to reduce very rapidly needs to reduce ribonucleotides
to form deoxyribonucleotides. So this is a very strong biochemical arguments to assume that indeed RNA or at the very least ribonucleotides can vary to deoxyribonucleotides.
Reply: 

Formation of Deoxyribonucleotides
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2028-the-dna-double-helix-evidence-of-design#3432

RNR enzymes are required to make DNA. DNA is however required to make RNR enzymes. What came first ??  We can conclude with high certainty that this enzyme buries any RNA world fantasies and any possibility of transition from  RNA to DNA world scenarios.


AL: "Today's biosphere is DNA based and the only known RNA lifeforms are RNA viruses." And he puts his life on between quotation marks which I think is a very fair description of the issue of whether they are alive or not. These depend on DNA host cells for their existence.
Reply:  What came first : Viruses, or life?

Viruses: Essential Agents of Life
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2100-viruses-essential-agents-of-life

THERE IS NO EXAGGERATION IN THE STATEMENT THAT THERE IS NO LIFE WITHOUT VIRUSES .

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com

Otangelo


Admin

Steve Benner is a world-class abiogenesis researcher. I cite him frequently. Now look what he confesses in this video:

Darwinism which Darwinism is a derivative of right that is indeed creationism right that's in fact understand the basis for all that
they in terms of their solution they invoke God which I have a problem with problem that is very hard to get our wisdom started because the chemistry doesn't let you do it

My comment: Here Benner exposes nicely his a priori commitment to naturalism because he has a problem with Creationism.

In other words: He does not infer Creationism, not because the evidence does not lead to it, but because, in his own words, he has a problem with it.....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KChJgqHTuiE

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com

Otangelo


Admin

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Hugh Ross Is the “Hand of God” Evident in Life’s Origin? March 2, 2020
Chemist Clemens Richert published an article in Nature Communications in which he more fully articulated Shapiro’s point.1 He began by explaining that the reputed goal of experimental biochemists doing origin-of-life research is “to re-enact what may have happened when life arose from inanimate material.”2 Richert pointed out, though, that such reenactments are unrealistic if one or more human interventions are required.

Reproducibility and Intervention
One such intervention that inevitably occurs arises from the experimenters’ desires that their results be reproducible by other biochemists. If their results cannot be reproduced, there is little, if any, likelihood that they will be published in any reputable science journal. This need for reproducibility forces the biochemists to begin with known quantities of pure chemicals. However, such fixed, pure quantities are unrealistic in any conceivable natural prebiotic scenario. The second law of thermodynamics inevitably introduces mixtures of structurally related but chemically interfering molecular aggregates.

Furthermore, to be relevant to any conceivable natural origin-of-life scenario the experiment must not involve any human intervention after the start of a reaction. There cannot be any addition or subtraction of chemicals during the reaction. The reaction must be allowed to unfold and samples drawn only after the reaction is completely finished.

Even when these strictures are rigorously obeyed not-so-subtle human interferences can and do occur. For example, in the famous Miller-Urey experiment3 where researchers claimed to synthesize amino acids from sparking a mixture of water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen in an enclosed flask, the experiment was performed about 200 times. In only one of those 200 trials were five amino acids generated, at a total concentration of two percent where nearly all of that two percent was glycine, the simplest amino acid. Moreover, the starting conditions were irrelevant. In any natural scenario, there would either be oxygen or ultraviolet radiation present and either would have halted the reaction. Also, the concentration of ammonia in any natural scenario would be far lower than what was present in the flask and inevitably there would be many more chemicals present than just water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen.

The Miller-Urey experiment is a classic example of multiple human interventions where the experimenters thought there were none. Today, the Miller-Urey experiment and many others like it are widely recognized as irrelevant to the origin of life on Earth or on any other planetary body.

Clemens Richert, “Prebiotic Chemistry and Human Intervention,” Nature Communications 9 (December 12, 2018): id. 5177, doi:10.1038/241467-018-07219-5

https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/is-the-hand-of-god-evident-in-life-s-origin

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