Re: The tar paradox

On 15/12/2024 2:35 am, LDagget wrote:

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 10:22:43 +0000, MarkE wrote:
 

On 14/12/2024 5:25 pm, erik simpson wrote:

On 12/13/24 9:51 PM, MarkE wrote:

On 14/12/2024 3:31 pm, erik simpson wrote:

Without reproduction tar is what you get for sure.  Nitrogen is high
enough concentration cause death by asphyxiation.

>
No reproduction prebiotically, therefore you're agreeing that the tar
paradox is an OoL showstopper?
>

I misprinted.  It's not a showstopper if the prebiotic reproduction is
present. It might be very slow or fail at some point.  The important
thing is that it's happening in many places.
>

>
What do you mean by "prebiotic reproduction"? Self-replicating naked
RNA? An autocatalytic set containing informational polymers?
>
In either case, these are disallowed if the tar paradox is unresolved.
And it appears to not only be unresolved, but largely unacknowledged.
>
Your statement "The important thing is that it's happening in many
places", is a vague, unsupported assertion, not an argument.

 This is a pretty goofy thread.
The initial assertion about adding energy means you produce tar is
the vague and insufficiently correct thing. Let's break it down.
 If you start with a soup of organic molecules and add in some high
energy reactants, you'll get a great deal of non-specific reactions.
I'm referring to, for example molecules prone to produce, for example,
free radicals or epoxides. These are so energetic that they will react
with the first thing they hit. That's somewhat exaggerated, but the
key point is that they won't show much discrimination so the reactions
that are "enabled" highly varied, not specific.
 With even a very modest understanding of biochemistry, you should see
that this is unlike biochemical reactions. Biochemical reactions,
especially the sorts involved with biopolymers are vastly more
specific, and require much less activation energy than exists with
free radicals and epoxides. You attach molding around a door with
finishing nails and a small hammer, not a wrecking ball.

We're not talking about biochecmical reactions here though. This is prebiotic chemistry, so this assessment relates exclusively to geochemical pathways.
Ironically, it could be argued that Miller-Urey actually demonstrated the tar paradox: unusable trace amounts of amino acids trapped in a tar mixture (paradigm-shifting AI response follows):
_In the Miller-Urey experiment, amino acids accounted for only a small percentage of the total organic products formed. The total yield of amino acids relative to all other products is estimated to be less than 2% of the total organic material.
Breakdown of Organic Products:
1. Carboxylic Acids (e.g., formic acid, acetic acid, and succinic acid): These dominated the product mix, typically making up 80-90% of the total organic compounds.
2. Hydroxy Acids (e.g., lactic acid and glycolic acid): Accounted for 5-10% of the total.
3. Amino Acids: Typically contributed about 1-2% of the total organic product yield.
4. Other Organic Molecules: Small amounts of urea, nitriles, aldehydes, and hydrocarbons were also formed, constituting the remainder of the products.
Why Such Low Concentrations of Amino Acids?
The relatively low yield of amino acids reflects:
• The complexity of their synthesis pathways compared to simpler molecules like carboxylic acids.
• Their degradation or conversion into other compounds under the experimental conditions.
Quantitative Estimates:
For example, in one analysis:
• Glycine, the most abundant amino acid, accounted for ~30-50% of the amino acids, but still less than 1% of the total product yield.
• The total amino acids combined (e.g., glycine, alanine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid) were in the micromolar range, compared to millimolar levels for carboxylic acids like formic acid and acetic acid._

So the naked statement about "when you put energy into organic material
it turns into asphalt" is not very useful. In fact, the rest of that
quote runs rough over the facts as well.
 But beyond this, it presses an absurdity: it presses the idea that
scientists think abiogenesis involved strictly random chemical
processes.
I'll grant there are astrobiologists, and even some ill-informed
biologists
that might speculate that way. But serious scientists all invoke
catalysis
early. And even basic knowledge of catalysis says that the chemistry
being done is a lower activation energies and is highly specific.
 So the core question at hand is, why are you indulging in this
irrelevant aside about high energy, uncatalyzed reactions, when your
supposed focus in on OoL research?
 Establishing ways to fail doesn't mean much. Visit an undergraduate
O-chem lab. All those kids with written directions failing to produce
the correct products doesn't mean the reactions don't work. It might
mean the search for intelligent life is difficult.
 

(Will try to follow up on this later)