Abiogenesis? Impossible !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJblRcgqXk
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2886-abiogenesis-impossible
Single proteins do not have any function on their own unless interconnected correctly in a living cell. In order for life to begin naturally, all essential proteins required for life to start would have had to emerge randomly on prebiotic earth, protein super-complexes like ribosomes would have had to join the subparts together to get the right protein-protein interactions, like lock and key. A miracle would have had to prevent them to be burned by UV radiation. Then start to interconnect in the correct order to create a functional metabolic network and multi-protein production lines, where the joint venture of several enzymes began to produce functional products, hand them over to carrier mechanisms, tag them in order to be transported to the right locations. Somehow, all this would have had to begin in a protected environment, so a protective envelope would have had to exist. That envelope had to emerge fully functional with " gates " that permit the right materials in, and the waste product out.
Once the data storage system (DNA) emerged, a language based on a code system had to be established, and the blueprint to store the information to make all parts of the cell had to be stored within it, and DNA replication errors had to be reduced 10.000.000.000 times.
Let's suppose that a self-replicating RNA molecule would appear miraculously on early earth. that does not explain the origin of the information to make all life essential parts in the cell.
It is as to go just from a hard drive storage device to a self replicating factory with the ability of self replication of the entire factory once ready, to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, regulate and coordinate all cellular processes, such as molecule and building block biosynthesis according to the cells demands, depending on growth, and other factors.
The ability of uptake of nutrients, to be structured, internally compartmentalized and organized, being able to check replication errors and minimize them, and react to stimuli, and changing environments. That's is, the ability to adapt to the environment is a must right from the beginning.
If just ONE single protein or enzyme - of many - is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life.
Somehow, that envelope had to create a homeostatic environment, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signalling. At the same time, a signalling 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 !!
Main topics on abiogenesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2678-maintopics-on-abiogenesis
Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
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
Main topics on complex, specified information in biochemical systems
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2625-main-topics-on-complex-specified-instructional-coded-information-in-biochemical-systems-and-life
Before we try to explain how life began, we need to understand what life is. Above is a list of ten things that life must be able to perform.
How life began, is a long standing open question, which was asked in Darwin's days and is asked still today.
Science has not been able to come up with satisfying answers despite of over half a century of intesive research.
George Whitesides, distinguished Harvard chemist
Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.’
That life on earth was initiated from abiotic beginnings about four billion years ago is a fundamental but unproven assumption.
That assumption forms the basis of the modern view which took shape in the 1920s through the joint contributions of the Russian biochemist, Alexander Oparin, and the influential British geneticist and evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane.
Most explanations suggest that the first forms of life were the outcome of a complex mixture of organic compounds of abiotic origin. The Miller Urey experiment and the RNA hypothesis were landmark contributions to the quest of how life emerged.
But the fact is however that while in the last sixty years or so, enormous scientific advances have been made, in the same time period, the total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life…
can be regarded as 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.
Many have not lost hope, and say: Science does not yet know, but one day, it will find out.
Is that not a classical gap argument? Naturalism of the gaps? How can proponents of spontaneous origin of life be so sure that one day the black box will be opened, and science will find a materialistic explanation?
Could it be, that we know enough, that there is enough scientific evidence after more than half a century of research, to infer with high certainty, that an unguided, random freaky accident is too unlikely, and so, impossible?
Denton wrote in: 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 systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.
“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 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.”
…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
Very few leading scientists in the field have the courage to openly admit that the origins of life problem cannot be solved, as Steven Benner.
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.
No scientific experiment has been able to come even close to synthesize and reproduce a self-replicating Cell in the Laboratory through self-assembly and autonomous organization.
In 2009, a headline in the news made the round: Life's First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory, News magazine Wired reported.
What Craig Venter did, was copying an existing bacterial genome and transplanted it into another cell, resulting in a genome of a minimal cell looking different than anything in nature. Claiming that this experiment was recreating life in the laboratory was evidently a far stretch and nothing of the sort.
Truth is, most people have not the slightest grasp of the enormous challenge to create life from scratch. Origin of life experiments are all performed in a controlled laboratory environment, with purified ingredients, concentrated at one spot, all done by intelligence. All this was not extant on early earth.
In a scientific article published in Nature magazine, John Sutherland wrote: Chemical evolution proposals envision a transition of a system from the inanimate state to the animate, as an increase in ‘aliveness’ over time, by a series of steps, rather than a single step.
Now, that is rather funny. It is as to ask a woman: are you pregnant? She: I am in a phase of increase of non-pregnancy to pregnancy.....
So, if a stepwise gradual emergence of life as portrayed above results in unbridgeable problems, why is it proposed nonetheless? Natural events have not the power to create the enormous complexity of the supposed simplest living cell, in one big leap.
But the materialistic framework upon which modern science rests, cannot permit supernatural explanations, with the excuse that the action of a creative agency cannot be tested, and so, the explanation is unscientific.
But, remarkably, lucid scientists, like Dr. Wilhelm Huck, have openly admitted that:
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity
And Scientific American wrote :
Some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all. ALL THREE of these are ESSENTIAL to life as we know it, yet scientists know disappointingly little about how any of these remarkable biological innovations came about.
By saying all three are essential, the authors confirm, that the three are not reducible, that is, without any of them, life could not exist. That is the very concept of irreducible complexity.
DNA is transcribed to RNA which is translated to Proteins. But proteins are required to make DNA and RNA. This creates an endless loop, which is only solved when we posit that all three emerged at the same time. ...
This problem was recognized already back in 1965
Incredibly complex genetic information, the instructional blueprint of life, is useless without some kind of incredibly complex translation and transcription machinery, and if there is no mechanism of replication and copying machinery of DNA, life would and could not replicate, and perpetuate.
So in order to solve that Chicken and egg catch22 problem, it was proposed that the so-called RNA world would solve that riddle.
In the early 1980s, research groups found that RNAs can also act as catalysts for chemical reactions, and as such, basically, perform the duties of proteins. This class of catalytic RNAs are known as ribozymes.
RNase P is among the most ancient of enzymes, a living molecular fossil from an “RNA world” in which life is thought to have originated.
According to the RNA World Hypothesis, life later evolved to use DNA and proteins due to RNA's relative instability and poorer catalytic properties, and gradually, ribozymes became increasingly phased out.
In order for that hypothesis to be true, somehow, nature would have had to come up with ribozymes without evolution.
So let's take RNA Ribonuclease, and calculate the odds for such an RNA protein to emerge by unguided events on the early earth. RNase P is a ribozyme, an enzyme with an active site that is composed of RNA, and it is present in every living organism. It has 124 amino acids and to get the right sequence by unguided lucky events, it would take 2.2^231 power of trials until getting the right sequence.
The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 10^80 power. So even to get the simplest ribozyme is in the realm of the utterly impossible.
By doing this calculation, we don't even take into consideration the enormous challenge to bond even ONE amino acid to another to form a Ribozyme without the aid of the sophisticated enzymatic machinery in the Cell, which evidently was not extant before Cells were fully operational.
So let's ask another question: What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts?
Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasma genitalium has been used as a prime model for minimal genomes. It is a human urogenital pathogen which has the smallest genome of size 580 000 bites and it consists of only 482 protein-coding genes.
Based on over 900 scientific publications, the authors of the paper A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, modelled a minimal organism in terms of its molecular components.
They came up with 28 processes which are absolutely essential to keep the basic functions of a living cell. That means, if any of these processes is missing, life would not exist as we know it. This is the very concept of irreducible complexity elucidated by a peer-reviewed science paper and not a proponent of intelligent design.
And this paper: A minimal estimate for the gene content of the last universal common ancestor investigated the minimal number of proteins required in a minimal Cell.
In the abstract of the paper, they elucidate that their aim was to reconstruct the gene content of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), a hypothetical life form that presumably was the progenitor of the three domains of life. 561 functional annotation description means, that 561 proteins constitute the minimal number of proteins to keep the basic functions of life.
Proteins are essential building blocks of living cells; indeed, life can be viewed as resulting substantially from the chemical activity of proteins. Because of their importance, it is hardly surprising that ancestors for most proteins observed today were already present at the time of the 'last common ancestor', a primordial organism from which supposedly all life on Earth descended.
We have listed above, thirteen essential, irreducible cellular processes, which are absolutely indispensable, requiring, as shown above, at least 561 proteins.
Now we can ask: What are the odds, to get a complete proteome of these proteins by unguided, random lucky events, by a freaky accident, if design did play no relevance to get life a first go?
So, the odds based on the calculation above, to get a functional minimal proteome for a minimal cell would one in 10^378.000.
To arrive at a statistical "proof," we need a reasonable criterion to judge it by : As just a starting point, consider that many statisticians consider that 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.
Borel's law holds that events, that require more than 10^50 power of trial and errors, to get one successful, can be considered impossible. (10^50 is the number 1 with 50 zeros after it, and it is spoken: "10 to the 50th power").
This appraisal seems fairly reasonable when you consider that 10^50 is about the number of atoms which make up the planet earth. So, overcoming one chance out of 10^50 is like marking one specific atom out of the earth, and mixing it in completely, and then someone makes one blind, random selection, which turns out to be that specifically marked atom.
Most mathematicians and scientists have accepted this statistical standard for many purposes.
Obviously, 10^378000 is 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.
But up to now, we analyzed the odds just to get a functional proteome. But the problem doesn't stop here. A cell must be able to produce all basic building blocks of life, amino acids, fatty acids, nucleotides, sugars,
these building blocks of life are essential to make carbohydrates, nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids. All of these are essential. And none was successfully synthesized in the laboratory.
So life does not depend solely on a minimal proteome, but as well a minimal genome, transcriptome, and metabolome. All of this had to emerge by unguided random lucky events if design is excluded. Evolution was not there to help.
Paul Davies, The origin of life, page 52
Acknowledging the inter-dependability 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? As 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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJblRcgqXk
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2886-abiogenesis-impossible
Single proteins do not have any function on their own unless interconnected correctly in a living cell. In order for life to begin naturally, all essential proteins required for life to start would have had to emerge randomly on prebiotic earth, protein super-complexes like ribosomes would have had to join the subparts together to get the right protein-protein interactions, like lock and key. A miracle would have had to prevent them to be burned by UV radiation. Then start to interconnect in the correct order to create a functional metabolic network and multi-protein production lines, where the joint venture of several enzymes began to produce functional products, hand them over to carrier mechanisms, tag them in order to be transported to the right locations. Somehow, all this would have had to begin in a protected environment, so a protective envelope would have had to exist. That envelope had to emerge fully functional with " gates " that permit the right materials in, and the waste product out.
Once the data storage system (DNA) emerged, a language based on a code system had to be established, and the blueprint to store the information to make all parts of the cell had to be stored within it, and DNA replication errors had to be reduced 10.000.000.000 times.
Let's suppose that a self-replicating RNA molecule would appear miraculously on early earth. that does not explain the origin of the information to make all life essential parts in the cell.
It is as to go just from a hard drive storage device to a self replicating factory with the ability of self replication of the entire factory once ready, to respond to changing environmental demands and regulate its metabolic pathways, regulate and coordinate all cellular processes, such as molecule and building block biosynthesis according to the cells demands, depending on growth, and other factors.
The ability of uptake of nutrients, to be structured, internally compartmentalized and organized, being able to check replication errors and minimize them, and react to stimuli, and changing environments. That's is, the ability to adapt to the environment is a must right from the beginning.
If just ONE single protein or enzyme - of many - is missing, no life. If topoisomerase II or helicase are missing - no replication - no perpetuation of life.
Somehow, that envelope had to create a homeostatic environment, diminishing the calcium concentration in the cell 10000 times below the external environment, to permit signalling. At the same time, a signalling 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 !!
Main topics on abiogenesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2678-maintopics-on-abiogenesis
Abiogenesis is impossible
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
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
Main topics on complex, specified information in biochemical systems
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2625-main-topics-on-complex-specified-instructional-coded-information-in-biochemical-systems-and-life
Before we try to explain how life began, we need to understand what life is. Above is a list of ten things that life must be able to perform.
How life began, is a long standing open question, which was asked in Darwin's days and is asked still today.
Science has not been able to come up with satisfying answers despite of over half a century of intesive research.
George Whitesides, distinguished Harvard chemist
Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.’
That life on earth was initiated from abiotic beginnings about four billion years ago is a fundamental but unproven assumption.
That assumption forms the basis of the modern view which took shape in the 1920s through the joint contributions of the Russian biochemist, Alexander Oparin, and the influential British geneticist and evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane.
Most explanations suggest that the first forms of life were the outcome of a complex mixture of organic compounds of abiotic origin. The Miller Urey experiment and the RNA hypothesis were landmark contributions to the quest of how life emerged.
But the fact is however that while in the last sixty years or so, enormous scientific advances have been made, in the same time period, the total lack of any kind of experimental evidence leading to the re-creation of life; not to mention the spontaneous emergence of life…
can be regarded as 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.
Many have not lost hope, and say: Science does not yet know, but one day, it will find out.
Is that not a classical gap argument? Naturalism of the gaps? How can proponents of spontaneous origin of life be so sure that one day the black box will be opened, and science will find a materialistic explanation?
Could it be, that we know enough, that there is enough scientific evidence after more than half a century of research, to infer with high certainty, that an unguided, random freaky accident is too unlikely, and so, impossible?
Denton wrote in: 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 systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.
“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 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.”
…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
Very few leading scientists in the field have the courage to openly admit that the origins of life problem cannot be solved, as Steven Benner.
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.
No scientific experiment has been able to come even close to synthesize and reproduce a self-replicating Cell in the Laboratory through self-assembly and autonomous organization.
In 2009, a headline in the news made the round: Life's First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory, News magazine Wired reported.
What Craig Venter did, was copying an existing bacterial genome and transplanted it into another cell, resulting in a genome of a minimal cell looking different than anything in nature. Claiming that this experiment was recreating life in the laboratory was evidently a far stretch and nothing of the sort.
Truth is, most people have not the slightest grasp of the enormous challenge to create life from scratch. Origin of life experiments are all performed in a controlled laboratory environment, with purified ingredients, concentrated at one spot, all done by intelligence. All this was not extant on early earth.
In a scientific article published in Nature magazine, John Sutherland wrote: Chemical evolution proposals envision a transition of a system from the inanimate state to the animate, as an increase in ‘aliveness’ over time, by a series of steps, rather than a single step.
Now, that is rather funny. It is as to ask a woman: are you pregnant? She: I am in a phase of increase of non-pregnancy to pregnancy.....
So, if a stepwise gradual emergence of life as portrayed above results in unbridgeable problems, why is it proposed nonetheless? Natural events have not the power to create the enormous complexity of the supposed simplest living cell, in one big leap.
But the materialistic framework upon which modern science rests, cannot permit supernatural explanations, with the excuse that the action of a creative agency cannot be tested, and so, the explanation is unscientific.
But, remarkably, lucid scientists, like Dr. Wilhelm Huck, have openly admitted that:
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. "A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity
And Scientific American wrote :
Some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all. ALL THREE of these are ESSENTIAL to life as we know it, yet scientists know disappointingly little about how any of these remarkable biological innovations came about.
By saying all three are essential, the authors confirm, that the three are not reducible, that is, without any of them, life could not exist. That is the very concept of irreducible complexity.
DNA is transcribed to RNA which is translated to Proteins. But proteins are required to make DNA and RNA. This creates an endless loop, which is only solved when we posit that all three emerged at the same time. ...
This problem was recognized already back in 1965
Incredibly complex genetic information, the instructional blueprint of life, is useless without some kind of incredibly complex translation and transcription machinery, and if there is no mechanism of replication and copying machinery of DNA, life would and could not replicate, and perpetuate.
So in order to solve that Chicken and egg catch22 problem, it was proposed that the so-called RNA world would solve that riddle.
In the early 1980s, research groups found that RNAs can also act as catalysts for chemical reactions, and as such, basically, perform the duties of proteins. This class of catalytic RNAs are known as ribozymes.
RNase P is among the most ancient of enzymes, a living molecular fossil from an “RNA world” in which life is thought to have originated.
According to the RNA World Hypothesis, life later evolved to use DNA and proteins due to RNA's relative instability and poorer catalytic properties, and gradually, ribozymes became increasingly phased out.
In order for that hypothesis to be true, somehow, nature would have had to come up with ribozymes without evolution.
So let's take RNA Ribonuclease, and calculate the odds for such an RNA protein to emerge by unguided events on the early earth. RNase P is a ribozyme, an enzyme with an active site that is composed of RNA, and it is present in every living organism. It has 124 amino acids and to get the right sequence by unguided lucky events, it would take 2.2^231 power of trials until getting the right sequence.
The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be 10^80 power. So even to get the simplest ribozyme is in the realm of the utterly impossible.
By doing this calculation, we don't even take into consideration the enormous challenge to bond even ONE amino acid to another to form a Ribozyme without the aid of the sophisticated enzymatic machinery in the Cell, which evidently was not extant before Cells were fully operational.
So let's ask another question: What might be a Cell’s minimal requirement of parts?
Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasma genitalium has been used as a prime model for minimal genomes. It is a human urogenital pathogen which has the smallest genome of size 580 000 bites and it consists of only 482 protein-coding genes.
Based on over 900 scientific publications, the authors of the paper A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, modelled a minimal organism in terms of its molecular components.
They came up with 28 processes which are absolutely essential to keep the basic functions of a living cell. That means, if any of these processes is missing, life would not exist as we know it. This is the very concept of irreducible complexity elucidated by a peer-reviewed science paper and not a proponent of intelligent design.
And this paper: A minimal estimate for the gene content of the last universal common ancestor investigated the minimal number of proteins required in a minimal Cell.
In the abstract of the paper, they elucidate that their aim was to reconstruct the gene content of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), a hypothetical life form that presumably was the progenitor of the three domains of life. 561 functional annotation description means, that 561 proteins constitute the minimal number of proteins to keep the basic functions of life.
Proteins are essential building blocks of living cells; indeed, life can be viewed as resulting substantially from the chemical activity of proteins. Because of their importance, it is hardly surprising that ancestors for most proteins observed today were already present at the time of the 'last common ancestor', a primordial organism from which supposedly all life on Earth descended.
We have listed above, thirteen essential, irreducible cellular processes, which are absolutely indispensable, requiring, as shown above, at least 561 proteins.
Now we can ask: What are the odds, to get a complete proteome of these proteins by unguided, random lucky events, by a freaky accident, if design did play no relevance to get life a first go?
So, the odds based on the calculation above, to get a functional minimal proteome for a minimal cell would one in 10^378.000.
To arrive at a statistical "proof," we need a reasonable criterion to judge it by : As just a starting point, consider that many statisticians consider that 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.
Borel's law holds that events, that require more than 10^50 power of trial and errors, to get one successful, can be considered impossible. (10^50 is the number 1 with 50 zeros after it, and it is spoken: "10 to the 50th power").
This appraisal seems fairly reasonable when you consider that 10^50 is about the number of atoms which make up the planet earth. So, overcoming one chance out of 10^50 is like marking one specific atom out of the earth, and mixing it in completely, and then someone makes one blind, random selection, which turns out to be that specifically marked atom.
Most mathematicians and scientists have accepted this statistical standard for many purposes.
Obviously, 10^378000 is 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.
But up to now, we analyzed the odds just to get a functional proteome. But the problem doesn't stop here. A cell must be able to produce all basic building blocks of life, amino acids, fatty acids, nucleotides, sugars,
these building blocks of life are essential to make carbohydrates, nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids. All of these are essential. And none was successfully synthesized in the laboratory.
So life does not depend solely on a minimal proteome, but as well a minimal genome, transcriptome, and metabolome. All of this had to emerge by unguided random lucky events if design is excluded. Evolution was not there to help.
Paul Davies, The origin of life, page 52
Acknowledging the inter-dependability 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? As 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?
Last edited by Admin on Fri Nov 29, 2019 2:00 pm; edited 38 times in total
