Re: HOW TO WIND THE 2.0 EVOLUTION PRIZE BY THE MAN WHO INITIATED THE PRIZE

Ron Dean wrote:

RonO wrote:

On 3/22/2024 7:34 PM, Ron Dean wrote:

RonO wrote:

On 3/20/2024 8:47 PM, Ron Dean wrote:

In  a search, I came across the site regarding the man, who initiated the $10,000,000 prize, an Engineer named Perry Marshall and his instructions as to how THE $10000000 PRIZE can be won.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhpPjmMsKIk
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The engineer has the wrong idea of what the issue is.  Life isn't the code.  Molecular chemistry evolved the code because it was a more efficient means to self replicate.  There were likely simple self replicators before there was a genetic code.  Self replicators were probably macromolecules that could synthesize more copies of themselves.
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It sounds like the whole thing is based on a false premise.

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I think, maybe you are wrong! One of the leading researchers in origin of life experments, Dr. Lee Cronin thinks he can win the $10,000,000 prize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njuso5A2jts

 It doesn't matter how many people think that they can win.  It doesn't change the fact that the guy that initiated the the whole thing doesn't understand what the problem is.

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Have you considered, it's you that's not understanding? It occurs to me that since Lee Cronin, one of the leading researchers in the quest for the explanation of how life began takes the challenge seriously, there must be something you and a number of others on TO are missing.
This is the challenge obviously is the origin of life. No one knows. But there are several hyppothesus
Then latest is heat vent at the ocean floor
or
life originated somehow on or in clay.
or
it came from outer space.
This hypothesis pushes the origin of life completely out of bounds.

Of course the single most commonly agreed upon theory is the first life came about through the RNA world. But where did we get RNA World?

difficult to say, but one possible contender is from Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) e.g. here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6747172/
If we

don't know where RNA came from, it too is
out of bounds. If we know nothing about life's origin what do we really know about evolution. This I think leaves evolution without a foundation.

That may sound convincing to a 4-year-old who just discovered the power
of the word "why" when asked repetitively for over an hour. For everybody
else not so much. We have e.g. excellent knowledge of how modern English evolved from Middle English, but already much less detailed ideas of how
Middle English evolved Old English, and even less how Old English
evolved from Ingvaeonic. For the origins of Ingvaeonic, we have to rely on
proto-Germanic, which is entirely a theoretical reconstruction, which
is even more true for its ancestors, proto-indo -European, etc And at
some point, evidence will simply run out and the reconstruction becomes
somewhat between mere speculation to "even impossible" to speculate - but
none of this lack of "foundation" has any bearing on what we know about the
evolution of the language of Shakespeare to that of Bob Dylan.
Similarly, we have excellent knowledge of the settlement of the northern part of America a by settlers from Britain, less knowledge of the settlement of Britain by the Saxons, and the Saxons "suddenly appear in the historical record" at around 200 AD, but without knowing much
of who they were or where they came from. Nonetheless, nobody argues that
means they popped fully formed into existence in Northern Germany on a
a fine spring day in 142 AD, or that our difficulties finding their ancestors
has any bearing whatsoever on our knowledge of the Pilgrim fathers ff. With all historical research, we will run out of data at some point
or another. In some disciplines earlier, in some later. That's what
we should expect, and it affects in no shape or form those things
that occurred later and that we can reconstruct

  The guy focused on the genetic code,

but the genetic code is not the basis of life on earth.  The information (biological code) that life depends on is the various molecular structures that can be made on earth and in our carbon based lifeforms. The genetic code is only the means that life evolved to replicate some of that chemical-structural information efficiently and with a high degree of accuracy.
 You can define life as something that requires a genetic code, but that doesn't mean that there wasn't something "living" that existed before there was a genetic DNA code.

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 Ron Okimoto
 

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  The initial

information that life relied on was simply the chemistry of their physical selves.  A macromolecule like a peptide chain may fold into a shape and have a surface and atomic structure exposed to the environment that will do things like dehydrate two molecules to create a chemical bond.  The information is in the physical nature of the macromolecule. A protein with a certain sequence of amino acids will fold into a structure that can facilitate other chemical reactions. The first self replicators could make copies of themselves.  They would not have had to perfectly replicate, in fact imperfect replication would allow them to evolve more functional variants of themselves.
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This type of information is required to enable the evolution of a genetic code.
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Ron Okimoto
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