CREATING life in the primordial soup may have been easier than we thought. Two essential elements of RNA have finally been made from scratch, under conditions similar to those that likely prevailed during the dawn of life.
The question of how a molecule capable of storing genetic information – even DNA’s simpler cousin RNA – could ever have arisen spontaneously in the primordial cooking pot has perplexed scientists for decades. RNA consists of a long chain composed of four different types of ribonucleotides, which each consist of a nitrogenous base, a sugar and a phosphate.
Most people assumed that these three components first formed separately, and then combined to make the ribonucleotides. The only trouble was that it seemed impossible that two of the four bases with particularly unwieldy chemistry ever reacted spontaneously with the sugar.
To tackle this problem, John Sutherland from the University of Manchester, UK, tried to work out a new recipe for RNA that gets by without forcing isolated bases and sugar molecules to react. His team experimented by cooking up ribonucleotides from five small molecules thought to be present in the primordial soup. “We started with the same building blocks as others, but take a different route,” Sutherland says.
Found by Misanthropic Scott on Cage Match.
#91 John wrote “If you study biology you’ll soon realize that things are a little too perfect to have happened by accident. Even the environment is evidence of this (we inhale oxygen and exhale CO2, plants ‘inhale’ CO2 and ‘exhale’ oxygen).”
When the photosynthetic process evolved on earth several billion years ago, I assure you that there were many anaerobic organisms that would have vehemently disagreed with your idea of perfection. Many of them even found the free oxygen that was produced to be the kiss of death — an agent of mass destruction. They cried their tiny little bacterial eyes out, and referred to this evolutionary development as “the Oxygen Catastrophe”…
http://tinyurl.com/2ejnlz
In memoriam for them, let’s have a moment of silence and let’s not be so fast and loose with our use of the word “perfect.”
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(if this works, thanks to M.Scott for advice on the “Thou shalt not use ‘href’ links” commandment that resulted in my earlier comment going to spam hell)
I don’t believe in atheists.
# 87 Misanthropic Scott said, “Just give me a single shred of credible evidence…”
Of course, you say this with full faith that Alfie can’t do it. He is bound by the restraints of his own religion. I used to have a friend who was not only a PhD psychologist but a Catholic priest. His proofs for a creator tended toward the beauty of the world and the complexity of life. My counter was that if there were truly a god that was all powerful and wanted us to believe in him and follow his rules, he could achieve that goal pretty quickly by just appearing in the sky all over the world and saying, : “I am the Lord, thy God and Jeremiah Wright is my Living Prophet on Earth! If you don’t do what I say, then I will do this to everyone…” and Australia disappears. I guarantee we’d all be on our knees praying before the clouds reformed.
#102 – DoubtYouAreInAFoxhole,
I think your reference will be offensive to these and many more atheists in foxholes.
http://maaf.info/expaif.html
#103 – Nimby,
I actually have no faith of any kind. In fact, so many people have had Faith that she’s all reamed out now. I’m surprised so many people still find her attractive.
Seriously though, I do not “have faith” that Alfie will not come back with evidence. I am merely confident that if such evidence had ever existed, we would hear about it by now.
So, were Alfie to truly come up with something real, I would indeed be shocked. However, I truly mean what I say in that I would become an agnostic. If the evidence were great enough, I would become a believer.
I would likely still not worship any creator, though I can’t be sure. I would like to hope that I would rather suffer for eternity than give obeisance to such a cruel deity.
But, who can say what I would really do if faced with evidence. Thus far though, none is forthcoming. So I can take comfort in the knowledge that my death will be just as my life was prior to my birth or even my conception. As I had no consciousness then, I expect to have no consciousness in death.
My life is a brief interlude in my oblivion for the age of the universe.
This does not bother me in the least. I expect there are many who fear non-existence too much to ever accept that it is their final reward. I do not fear death. Alfie likely does not fear death either since he likely does not believe in death. (I don’t want to speak with any great certainty about the mind of someone I never met. So, I say likely.)
#105, Scott,
In fact, so many people have had Faith …
Reminds me of last Christmas. At the party, everyone was feeling pretty Merry. When Merry went home we jumped for Joy.
#103, Nimby
If you don’t do what I say, then I will do this to everyone…” and Australia disappears.
I would think (or like to see) something along the lines of :
“And all that genocide wasn’t really me. It was my identical twin brother. You know, the ugly one, that did all that stuff, and created cripples, and gimps, and retards, and rednecks, and blind folk, and herpes, and wimin that dye their roots black. Ya, ya, I know the dude is a dick, but hey, he is my brother and although mom always loved him best, yada yada, well, I’m back in charge now.
Now reading from my list of prayer questions, the first one is ‘why did I give men nipples.’ …”
Mr Fusion
#106 – then we made a mistake and kissed under Holly.
#107 – And … “Sure, I gave you cancer and I’m sorry for that. But, good grief, I was sure you’d have figured out what to do with stem cells by now!”
#79, Alex, there is no such thing as a “silica electron.” Electrons are electrons regardless of which atoms they are attached to, or when they are just hanging around by themseleves.
#9,Kayless, genetic systems tend to organization and not chaos. You are correct for systems in which life is not a factor.
#101 – Gary,
Excellent point about the toxicity of oxygen to most precambrian life. I was thinking about this some more after reading your post. It occurred to me that if bacteria fossilized a lot better, the time of the cambrian explosion, or probably just a bit before, would likely be recorded not as a huge burst in evolution, but quite possibly as the greatest mass extinction event on the planet. It might well have beaten out the Permian/Triassic extinction, especially if it turned out that most of the bacteria of the time survived the P/T extinction.
Remember everyone, not only are the vast majority of the species on this planet still unicellular, but they are so numerous both as individuals and as species, that they also make up more than 50% of the biomass of the planet. The sum total of bacteria on this planet still out mass even all of the trees, elephants, humans, whales, etc. combined.
This brings up another question, if there were a god, would it be safe to say that we just an afterthought and the bacteria the main focus?
#110 Misanthropic Scott, I got a laugh from your perspective, but it’s entirely correct. It seems unorthodox to think of the type of bacterial extinctions that may have occurred as being “mass extinctions” because they’re such small critters, but the numerical scale of the disaster certainly justifies use of the term. However, I’m sure many types survived, living on protected oxygen-free bacterial preserves, for which proper funding was always a real fight
Sometimes I feel like such an afterthought, too.
Certainly many survived Gary. There are more species on small branches of the bacterial cladogram than exist in the entire animal kingdom.
As for afterthoughts, how could we be central to anything in a universe with 10^11 galaxies and 10^22 planets? If we’re so central to the mind of some deity, it would make said deity one incredibly wasteful character.
No. We’re just a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot. That said dot is important to me does not make it important in the grand scheme of things.
@65: Atheism is not the belief that god doesn’t exist. That’s called anti-theism. Atheism comes from the old greek prefix of “a”, as in “asexual”, which means “not”, or “without”. So an ahteist is simply someone who is not a theist. I do realize that a lot of people like to twist the term “atheist”, however, if you look at the etymology of the word, it’s right there.
A lot of thesauruses have accepted the notion that atheist and anti-theist is the same thing, but they are wrong.
All anti-theists are atheists, but not all atheists are anti-theists. I don’t believe in god, but I don’t completely rule it out. Some might call the agnostic, but agnosticism deal with knowledge and atheism with belief, so they aren’t the same.
#113
What you are discussing is a warping of vernacular. It goes like this:
1. There is no evidence to support the claim that a supernatural being exists
2. (Shortened to) There is no evidence to claim that a god exists.
3. (Shortened to) I do not accept that god exists.
4. (Shortened to) God does not exist.
Much like trying to expand compressed images, some of the information is lost when you attempt to analyze lexicon that has been shortened for brevity. The first statement is actually what atheists are saying when they utter the last statement in the above list. As we have seen, it is difficult for theists to grasp this dynamic.
#113 Johan, #114 Thomas
You’re right about atheist. And Thomas has given a very succinct explanation of the confusion.
However, antitheists, by my understanding actively oppose theism. Where an atheist does not believe in any gods, an antitheist opposes the belief in god.
As an antitheist myself, I take the view that religion and the belief in a deity have had a deleterious effect on humanity as a whole, as evidenced by the large number of deleted humans.
So, I am actively outspoken against religion and against theism. This, to me, is antitheism. I do not believe one can be an antitheist quietly.
Wow, you guys are still arguing over something that didn’t happen.
#116 – Patrick,
Have you ever actually contributed to any of these discussions? Perhaps you should see if you can form an intelligent thought before typing.
Antitheism is pointless. It is a political position, rather than a philosophical one, which has as its major goal “dissing” the heartfelt though unprovable beliefs of the majority of humanity. It is like belonging to a group whose sole objective is to throw banana cream pies in the faces of prominent people. Sure, it might amuse you, but it is simply annoying.
Atheism or Agnosticism are rational positions based on the absence of convincing evidence for or against God.
Theism is a personal belief that attempts to attribute rational order to a random universe in order to make it make more sense. It makes you feel good, and inspires magnificent art, music and literature. On the other hand it is almost certainly misguided.
One thing is for sure, theology is definitely misguided. It causes people to commit heinous acts and to hate one another for mere beliefs. Since there are over a thousand religions on Earth, all claiming to be correct, the chances that your personal religion is in fact correct are infinitesimal. But humans are fundamentally like sheep and want to follow some herd even if it is taking them over a cliff.
to bubbaray #34
actually, if i set cookie dough on the counter for 15 million years, there is no way in hell it will turn into cookies.
i have to form it into cookies and put them in the oven and bake it.
even the moldy, rotting cookie dough is affected by something. something causing the dough to mold and decay.
and people are asking about where god came from…
dr. william lane craig explains it.