Re: OoL – out at first base?

On 10/12/2024 1:29 am, RonO wrote:

On 12/8/2024 11:54 PM, MarkE wrote:

We need prebiotic formation and supply of nucleotides for RNA world, and other models at some stage. The scope of the problem of the supply of these precursors is prone to underestimation.
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Nucleotides are chemically challenging in terms of the prebiotic synthesis and assembly of their three constituents of nitrogenous base, sugar and phosphate group.
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Harder again are the requirements for supply of these building blocks. You need (eventually) all canonical bases in sufficient concentration, purity, chirality, activation, distribution, location, etc.
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But the greatest problem I think is this: time. How long must you maintain the supply described above in order to assemble a self- replicating RNA strand? And even if you managed that, how much more time is needed before reaching a protocell capable of self-synthesising nucleotides? One million years? One hundred million years?
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A hypothised little warm pond with wetting/drying cycles (say) must provide a far-from-equilibrium system...for a million years...or hundreds of millions of years. You can’t pause the process, because any developing polymers will fall apart and reset the clock.
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What are the chances of that kind of geological and environmental stability and continuity?
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Therefore, the formation of an autonomous protocell naturalistically has vanishingly small probability.
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 So how much in denial did you have to dive in order to come back with this argument?  Willful ignorance is lying to yourself.
 Explain how you have reconciled the fact that the origin of life on this planet is not Biblical, so you would be found to be worshiping the wrong designer if the origin of life on earth requires some other god's help? It would be the wrong god.  Right?
 The gap denial doesn't do you any good when the gaps do not support the Biblical version of creation.  You have to start admitting that the Bible is wrong, and can't be trusted on these matters, so there is no reason to claim some god is needed to fill that gap.  The other creationists on TO got that from the Top Six, so what kind of lies do you have to keep telling yourself to avoid that?
 Most creationists have accepted that you can't rely on the Bible to be correct about the creation.  It has been known for a very long time that the earth is not flat, there is no firmament above the earth that the designer has to open to let the rain fall through.  The earth is not the center of the universe.  The order of creation described in Genesis is wrong.  There is no reason for the gap denial any longer.  You are not supporting the existence of the Biblical designer doing this.  You are just in conflict with creationists like Denton that think that his designer got the ball rolling with the Big Bang and it has all unfolded into what we have today, and creationists like Denton don't care if you are right or wrong.  Whether you are right or wrong obviously does not matter to science.  Science has to deal with what exists.
 The Biblical god is not the one that fills the existing origin of life gap.  You are just arguing against the existence of the god described in the Bible.  The other creationists on TO recognized the fact that if some legitimate ID science was ever accomplished it would just be more science to deny because that designer would not be the Biblical designer.  The last TO IDiots no longer support the ID scam.  They are still creationists, but they do not want to believe in the designer that fills the Top Six gaps supporting intelligent design.  The origin of life is #3.
 It does look like there was an RNA phase before the genetic code evolved.  The fact is that no one knows what the first self replicating molecules were.  Once these self replicating molecules became large enough they would have catalytic ability dependent on their three dimensional structure and not only dependent on their reactive chemical parts.  Before RNA my take is that there were self replicating molecules that would evolve secondary catalytic activities that supported their replication.  They could have evolved the ability to make lipids and formed lipid bilayers.  They probably could have started to make nucleotides.  They would have used them for the same function that they are still used today.  Nucleotides are very efficient energy storage and transfer molecules.  ATP is still the main energy coin in the cell, but the other nucleotides are also used as energy transfer molecules in various chemical reactions.  Life could have evolved for ATP to have that function.  RNA polymers would just be the initial means to store nucleotides so that they were less likely to leak out of the first cells.  Those polymers would have the opportunity to evolve replicating ability due to the base-pairing ability of the nucleotides.
 There is no reason to believe that RNA polymers were required to initiate self replication.
 Ron Okimoto
 

Generalise "nucleotides" to "building blocks" if you wish. The same logic applies.