Re: West Virginia creationism

On 08/05/2024 20:01, Ron Dean wrote:

I don't know that you are familiar with anything ID proposes, or the case against evolution and especially the impossibility of the origin of life from inorganic, dead chemistry.
There are over 500 known amino acids know in nature, but all living organisms are made up of only 20 different amino acids. What what was the odds of this happening without deliberate choice?  And all are left-handed, but if they were the result of blind chance, purposeless and aimless natural processes about half of the amino acids should have been right-hand. This is not the case. Exactly what was the selection process that selected this particular set of 20 out of 500 known amino acids? Of course there are educated guesses, hypothesis and theories, but no 0ne knows. Each protein is expressed by a particular order or arrangement of amino acids. The smallest protein known, the saliva of a Gila minster is 20 amino acids. What are the odds of these 20 amino acids having the correct sequence on just one protein by chance?

Interesting. Where do you think that those 500 amino acids were found, except in organisms? (Some might have been found in carbonaceous chrondrites, but I expect that the majority are part of the makeup of organisms.) Update: on checking Wikipedia, I see that it gives that number, citing a paper which gives that number for amino acid monomers incorporated in amino acid oligomers and polymers produced by non-ribosomal synthesis. You might ask how many of these 500 amino acids were around, and in what relative and absolute concentrations, before living organisms got round to making them.
The basic genetic code does cater for 20 amino acids, but in addition to that there is the kludge that incorporates selenocysteine into the genetic code and proteins, the bacteria who have a genetic code that also codes for pyrolysine, post-translational modification of proteins to form hydroxyproline (commoner in animal tissue that 7 of the canonical proteinogenic amino acids) and a significant number of rarer amino acid residues, the use of gamma amino-butyric acid as neurotransmitter (is your 500 number all amino acids, or just alpha amino acids?), and so on.
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alias Ernest Major