Do you guys actually think that prebiotic chemicals could by themselves have synthesized all the elements of a SYSTEM containing DNA, RNA, ribosomes to make proteins, instructions in the DNA to make useful proteins, a means to make ATP, a means to fix nitrogen? Do you think a code (the genetic code) can create itself? I think religion is all nonsense and false made-up answers, but there’s a case to be made for the existence of a creator of life, or is such a creator not god?
Posted: June 6th 2008
Eric_PK
I used to see a distinct line between living and non-living.
Once you have living, of course, evolution starts happening, and it’s clear that evolution can generate complexity.
So, the question in my mind is “how do you get to the first replicator?”
That would seem to be a big hurdle, but after a bit more study, I don’t think it’s as big as it seems.
There are physical processes that create organization where there is one. Crystallization is an obvious one. Forming of lipid spheres is another one. These all take place because of chemical processes, and I don’t think it’s farfetched to think that you can travel from simple chemical processes up to something that we wold think of as “alive”. I no longer see a bright line, but rather a smooth progression from simple chemical processes up through RNA and then finally to DNA.
And the building blocks are likely to have been very abundant on earth – we know that there are a lot of organic chemicals in space, and that environment is (in general) harsher than the environment of the early earth.
I don’t see any reason to require a creator god for that process.
Posted: June 16th 2008
Reed Braden www
No, I, personally, do not believe that organic molecules could have had the immense luck to collide in just the right way to produce “life” in the sense of the organelles we see in modern cells. Also, it’s very far-fetched to think that these pre-biotic organic molecules could have joined to form anything even like today’s nucleic acids that carry genetic information. What began life is somewhat of a gap in our knowledge, although it is being filled. To use it as an argument for deism is, although it doesn’t seem like it at first glimpse, a prime example of the God of the Gaps fallacy. This gap proves nothing except that the earliest life must be much simpler than modern cells and organelles.
That people think that the most primitive “life” must be something like a fully-formed, functional cell or organelle stems from the annoying human habit of labelling things before we understand them. We labelled life before we realised that there really wasn’t an organism we could point to and say, “That is the first living thing.” The beginning of life was a gradual process leading out of the realm of chemistry and into biology, and our definition of life ignores the overlap between advanced chemistry and primitive biology: where abiotic chemistry and geology taper off and biochemistry and biology step in.
If you want a glimpse at what scientists currently think life began as, there is a great presentation on YouTube here, found on PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula.
Posted: June 16th 2008
SmartLX www
It’s not often that a deist argument, one which supports creation alone, is presented as only that, and for managing it I commend you. The usual drill is to overextend it to try and prove a particular god.
The short answer to your initial question is yes. Prebiotic chemicals could have synthesised all the necessary ingredients for life. How do I know? Because they did it. We’re here. Some parts of the process have been artificially replicated (the creation of amino acids, for example, and very recently the construction of a basic cell) and some haven’t, but there’s nothing physically impossible about it and there were plenty of opportunities to say the least. Let me explain.
The chemicals in the prebiotic Earth didn’t just sit on their figurative butts. They were flung back and forth and up and down by everything on this planet which doesn’t need life to move: winds, waves, lava flows, earthquakes, landslides, rain and lightning. Countless chemicals, ranging from hydrogen and helium in the air and water to lead and uranium deep in the ground. Thrown against each other, mixed together then blown apart, over and over for a billion years.
It’s true that the chances of this or that particular protein assembling are miniscule. But how many different proteins are there? Moreover, how many possible proteins and equivalents are there? How many permutations of the molecules on this planet could have formed the basis for slightly or wildly different forms of life? The scale of the possibilities (I’m making an assertion, but feel free to research this) is on a par with the scale of the improbabilities.
It’s not about these twenty chemicals coming together on this date 3.5 billion years ago to make this exact enzyme. It’s about a random process of combination that had practically unlimited time, space and materials. It’s about a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, to the power of a number those monkeys might type. It was only a matter of time before something happened.
Once a living replicator existed, it was still heavily dependent on luck to survive wherever it was, but suddenly evolution was a factor and not everything was random. If it changed in the slightest as it made copies, the changes would compete through their hosts. The winners were better at two things: surviving, and replicating. And so it began.
I want to address your point about codes directly. The genetic “code” works not because there’s a genetic computer which decodes it, but because each part of the sequence has a physical consequence. Like the studs on the cylinder of a music box, the DNA has a direct physical effect on the tissue around it. This has come to be translated by various mechanisms into useful action, like a piston turns a wheel. There is no ethereal code as such, and nothing to interpret the sequence the way a computer would. There is only physical cause and effect, guided to productive ends by sheer brute force trial and error. Inefficient, wasteful, destructive, sure. But it worked.
Posted: June 9th 2008
brian thomson www
I think you’d be better-off addressing this question to some actual biochemists.
I did a little web-searching, and one of the first results was trueorigin.org, where I presume you got this question from – that or a similar “intelligent design” site, or from a Michael Behe book.
Rebuttals to Behe et al on questions of biochemical evolution:
- Ussery (1996 – Behe book review)
- Stevens (1998)
- Johansson (1999)
- MRC Dunn Inst. (2005 – ongoing research)
You can find more by searching, from people qualified to discuss biochemistry in the kind of detail you seem to want. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to avoid god of the gaps arguments – the claim that just because the evolutionary picture is not complete today, that somehow “god did it”.
I expect, at this point, you’ll be thinking something like “this guy believes what he reads on the internet, yet he dismisses arguments from 'intelligent design’”. My response to that is simple: I don’t believe in this, or in Evolution in general, in the sense required by proponents of religion. That is, I am not expected to demonise those who offer opposing arguments, try to convert people to my point of view, or build my personal life around Evolution.
Being an atheist, in itself, does not make me a believer in anything in particular. I generally agree with the theory of Evolution, because of the useful explanations it provides, but I don’t use it as a guide for life in general. I generally accept what most published evolutionists say on the topic (Dawkins, Myers et al), but I don’t follow them, spend money on more than a book or two, or take action on anything they say. If I honestly cared more about the biochemistry details, I would investigate it properly before formulating a view – but that still does not make me any more keen on “intelligent design”, because saying “god did it” is not a useful explanation: it does not shed any more light on the topic than was there before.
In short, I find it bemusing that you think common-or-garden atheists are qualified to answer questions like these. Do you really think my life is somehow missing “something”, and I should therefore embrace your particular religion, because I do not have a complete evolutionary timeline of the origins of ATP synthase to hand? (Why else would you post this here, and not on a biochemistry forum?)
Posted: June 9th 2008
logicel
Cosmology is advancing, whittling even further the god gaps of irreducible complexity and intelligent design on the cosmic plane.
If irreducible complexity was disproved on the evolutionary level, I can’t see why it won’t be on the cosmic level. Less complicated molecules can perform a function on their own, like the syringe component of the bacterial flagellum motor did, before they join to make more complicated molecules.
Just as the intelligent design perspective was dismantled by Evolutionary Theory by showing how small changes through time can result in climbing the Mount Improbable of significant change, Cosmology can point to a similar path.
If the answer to the theologically troubling question of Who made god is answered by god always was, then why can’t the answer just as equally be the Universe always was?
As there is no evidence that a divine designer who cares personally for his creation is actually working his influence on Earth, it makes more sense to grasp that an impersonal universe always existed.
Posted: June 9th 2008