Wait a minute you said:
That would negate a supernatural source, obviously.
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The law of gravity is also well established. It however, doesn’t perfectly describe Mercury’s orbit.
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Really? The Kalam is all you have? 1. All cells that begin to exist come from cells as the cause of their beginning to exist. · 2. Cells began to exist. · 3. Therefore, the cells began to exist. That’s about as circular as an argument gets, and it says nothing at all regarding where cells came from. On the other hand we do have scientific inquiry into the origin of cells… But then you wouldn’t be interested in that.
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Old_man_shouts_at_clAtheist
Old man shouts, said: “"Gooal’!! Oh, no the score has been disallowed, team god have removed the goalposts and set them up in the next field over…”
Thank science for revealing how its more complex than we think and moving the goalposts. And you have in your hands Eigen’s Paradox.
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Oh look, the mythology fanboy has resurrected the tiresome Pasteur Canard …
The Pasteur canard.
We have had several people erecting this canard here, and it usually takes the form of the erection of the statement “life does not come from non-life”, usually with a badly cited reference to the work of Louis Pasteur. This particular piece of duplicitous apologetics, apart from being duplicitous, is also fatuous. The reason being that Louis Pasteur erected his “Law of Biogenesis” specifically for the purpose of refuting the mediaeval notion of spontaneous generation, a ridiculous notion which claimed that fully formed multicellular eukaryote organisms arose directly from dust or some similar inanimate medium. First, the modern theory of abiogenesis did not exist when Pasteur erected this law; second, the modern theory of abiogenesis does not postulate the sort of nonsense that abounded in mediaeval times (and which, incidentally, was accepted by supernaturalists in that era); and third, as a methodologically rigorous empiricist, Pasteur would wholeheartedly accept the large quantity of evidence provided by modern abiogenesis researchers if he were still alive.
The idea that the origin of life is grounded in chemistry isn’t “magic”, despite your tiresome and predictable attempt to misrepresent this idea thus. Indeed, life IS chemistry writ large - millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions [b]stop[/i], you die.
Indeed, this is how poisons work - by interfering with or shutting down critical metabolic reactions. For example, cyanide compounds exert their lethal influence by irreverisbly binding to cytochrome C oxidase enyzmes in mitochiondria, stopping them from transferring oxygen to the ATP synthesis pathway. So effective is cyanide at performing this function, that death follows in about three minutes if you consume, say, 50 grams of potassium cyanide.
Likewise, it’s precisely because life is based upon chemistry, that pharmaceuticals work. Everything from antibiotics, which act to interfere fatally with bacterial metabolism, through painkillers (which bind to COX2 enzymes or opioid receptors to exert their influence), to the various dopamine treatments that are therapeutic agents for Parkinson’s Disease, operate via well-defined chemistry. An interesting example is Loperamide, which is an opioid that isn’t absorbed through the gut, but which makes its way to the large intestine and rectum, where it binds to opioid receptors that control defecation, and thus acts as a means of treating diarrhoea in combination with other agents that deal with salmonella or amoebic dysentery (the latter being a condition I have unpleasant personal experience of).
As for the origin of life, over 100,000 peer reviewed scientific papers from the prebiotic chemistry literature, document in exquisite detail the laboratory experiments that have been conducted, establishing that every chemical reaction implicated in the origin of life works. As well as the synthesis pathways for simple molecules such as lipids, amino acids and nucleotides (numerous papers cover such reactions in detail), we have, for example, laboratory experiments establishing that RNA molecules are synthesised via the catalytic action of montmorillonite clays in marine aqueous environments, once we have nucleotide synthesis in place. Furthermore, other experiments have established that RNA molecules themselves exhibit a wide range of catalytic activities for other chemical reactions, including self-replication in the presence of a supply of nucleotides. Indeed, recently, a team of Japanese scientists not only established that RNA molecules sythesised in such a manner exhibit self-replication capability, but generate their own molecular ecosystem via Darwinian evolution.
Indeed, the literature informs us that the research in this field has moved on to experiments with synthetic model protocells, and the journal Nature alone has entire collections of scientific papers covering said experiments. I can provide citations in abundance from the literature, and since I’ve spent 14 years reviewing said papers, I’ll know in advance if you’re quote mining said papers or erecting specious apologetic fabrications to try and hand-wave away the results.
Indeed, I’ve posted relevant results in the past in detail on the old version of this forum, but I’m working on an updated version that includes more modern work and references to add to the material extant in that previous post, and I’ll enjoy working on that new version.
Several of the regulars here will enjoy the finished product.
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For those interested, I’ve now completed my work on the updated origin of life article I first wrote way back in 2010, with recent updates to include Sutherland’s work on prebiotic nucleotide synthesis, and the recent work on the eregence of molecular ecosystems in a Darwinian laboratory RNA experiment by a team of Japanese scientists. You can read the article here. Enjoy.
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@Sherlock-Holmes will enjoy that, he claims to be scientifically trained apparently. Though he also claims to believe in unevidenced superstition and mythologies.
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I think I can leave you to read Callissea’s reply. It will, of course, or should, of course make you pick up your ball and goalposts from that far distant field and retreat sobbing that "science! It’s not fair, I LIKE my fantasy".
Funny how a gotcha moment can turn to dust in your chubby fist ain’t it?
Stay well, and do read that article from the big C. It comes from a well of knowledge that I can barely sip at.
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To me, it’s getting clear that the statements S-H make about science having no facts are a projection brought over from his entirely faith-based religious beliefs, in order to defend them from science/fact based arguments and protect his religion from being “bested” by science.
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I agree, it leaped out at me even among his relentless bs, that’s why I spent twenty minutes finding the posts when he tried to deny it yesterday, and implied that I had misrepresented him. Once the quotes were up he completely ignored that conversation, even though I repeated them 3 times. Then he lost it and started hurling abuse indiscriminately, a sure sign he knew he’d been busted for lying.
The real hilarity is that I guarantee he was wrongly defining fact as some sort of absolute, it’s surprising how many theists do that, especially when discussing scientific facts that refute the core doctrine of their religious beliefs. He tried so hard to sneer at the claim without ever honestly addressing it, it was like a red flag. The more he ran away the more clear it was he knew he’d said something stupid, but didn’t have the integrity to admit it.
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The probabilities associated with abiogenesis are high, yes, but not as high as creationists seem to think, and they don’t need super pure materials either.
The big mistake creationists make when thinking about abiogenesis and evolution is they think everything has to happen in a single step rather than cumulatively. Any chemist will admit the odds of individual atoms suddenly coming together and forming a molecule of RNA are absolutely astronomical, but that’s not how it’s postulated that the first self-replicating molecules came about. It was more of a cumulative process, and the odds wouldn’t be nearly as great.
The earth is a big place, and geologic time is immense (4.5 billion years is 45 million centuries), so with a batch of impure chemicals churning away in vast oceans of primordial soup for a billion years, it’s not unlikely that a primitive self-replicating molecule will form. Once that happens, evolution takes over and a few hundred million years later we have the first primitive cell–it’s just chemistry–no cartoon magic man required.
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Creationists also tend to “forget” about self-organization and self-assembly in chemical and physical systems.
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This is why their objections to evolution are mostly straw man arguments.
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Basically, this is yet another variation on the Serial Trials Fallacy, combined with either a complete failure to understand basic chemistry, or wilfully duplicitous disregard thereof.
I’ll begin my exposition with:
The Serial Trials Fallacy
Basically, the Serial Trials Fallacy consists of assuming that only one participant in an interacting system is performing the necessary task at any one time. While this may be true for a lone experimenter engaged in a coin tossing exercise, this is assuredly NOT true of any system involving chemical reactions, which involves untold billions of atoms or molecules at any given moment. This of course has import for abiogenesis as well, against which bad probability calculations and the Serial Trials Fallacy are routinely deployed. I shall concentrate here on abiogenetic scenarios, but what follows applies equally to nuclear DNA replication and any absurd arguments based upon bad probability calculations and the Serial Trials Fallacy that mutations cannot occur in a given amount of time.
The idea is simply this. If you only have one participant in the system in question, and the probability of the desired outcome is small, then it will take a long time for that outcome to appear among the other outcomes. But, if you have billions of participants in the system in question, all acting simultaneously, then even a low-probability outcome will occur a lot more quickly.
For example, if I perform trials that consist of ten coin tosses in a row per trial, and this takes about 20 seconds, then I’m going to take a long time to arrive at 10 heads in a row, because the probability is indeed 1/(210) = 1/1024. In accordance with a basic law of probability, namely that if the probability of the event is P, the number of serial trials required will be 1/P, I shall need to conduct 1,024 serial trials to obtain 10 heads in a row (averaged over the long term of course) and at 1 trial every 20 seconds, this will take me about six days, if all I do is toss coins without any breaks for sleep, food or other necessary biological functions. If, however, I co-opt 1,024 people to perform these trials in parallel, at least one of them should arrive at 10 heads from the very outset. If I manage by some logistical wonder to co-opt the entire population of China to toss coins in this fashion, then with a billion people tossing the coins, we should see 1,000,000,000/1024, which gives us 976,562 Chinese coin tossers who should see 10 heads in a row out of the total 1,000,000,000 Chinese.
Now given that the number of molecules in any given reaction even in relatively dilute solutions is large (a 1 molar solution contains 6.023 × 1023 particles of interest per litre of solution, be they atoms, molecules or whatever) then we have scope for some serious participating numbers in terms of parallel trials. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument in a typical prebiotic scenario, that only the top 100 metres of ocean depth is available for parallel trials of this kind (which is a restriction that may prove to be too restrictive once the requisite experimental data are in from various places around the world with respect to this, and of course totally ignores processes around volcanic black smokers in deep ocean waters that could also fuel abiogenetic reactions) and we further assume that the concentration of substancers of interest is only of the order of millimoles per litre, then that still leaves us with the following calculation:
[1] Mean radius of Earth = 6,371,000 m, and 100 m down, that radius is 6,370,900 m
[2] Volume of sea water of interest is therefore 4/3π(R3-r3)
which equals 5.1005 × 1016 m3
1 litre of solution of 1 mmol l-1 will contain 6.023 × 1020 reacting particles of interest, which means that 1 m3 of solution will contain 6.023 × 1026 particles, and therefore the number of particles in the 100 metre layer of ocean around the world will be 3.0730 × 1043 particles. So already we’re well into the territory where our number of parallel trials will make life a little bit easier. At this juncture, if we have this many interacting particles, then any reaction outcome that is computed to have a probability of greater than 1/(3.073 ×1043) is inevitable with the first reaction sequence.
Now, of course, this assumes that the reactions in question are, to use that much abused word by reality denialists, “random” (though their usage of this word tends to be woefully non-rigorous at the best of times). However, chemical reactions are not “random” by any stretch of the imagination (we wouldn’t be able to do chemistry if they were!), which means that once we factor that into the picture alongside the fact that a parallel trial involving massive numbers of reacting molecules is taking place, the spurious nature of these probabilistic arguments against evolution rapidly become apparent.
The same parallel trials of course take place in reproducing populations of organisms. Of course, the notion falsely propagated by reality denialists is that we have to wait for one particular organism to develop one particular mutation, and that this is somehow “improbable”. Whereas what we really have to wait for is any one organism among untold millions, or even billions, to develop that mutation, for evolution to have something to work with. If that mutation is considered to have a probability of 1/109, then we only have to wait for 109 DNA replications in germ cells to take place before that mutation happens. If our working population of organisms is already comprised of 1 billion individuals (last time I checked, the world human population had exceeded 6.6 billion) then that mutation is inevitable.
Now, having dealt with the Serial Trials Fallacy, I’ll turn everyone’s attention to the fact that chemical reactions are well-defined processes, that will occur between relevant chemical species if the energy conditions favour this. I’ll introduce everyone to key concepts at this point, namely bond energy and enthalpy.
Evrey chemical bond between two atoms has an energy associated with it. This is the energy required to break that bond. To make life easier calculation wise, this is usually specified as the amount of energy required to break a mole of the chemical bonds in question, because that energy is frequently in the region of kilojoules, and can therefore be measured very easily in, say, a bomb calorimeter. However, divide that energy by the number of bonds in a mole, and the energy per individual bond is tiny. For example, to break a mole of C-H bonds in, for example, a mole of methane, requires 337 kJ per mole, which means that an individual C-H bond requires 5.104 × 1019 J to break - this is about 3.1 electron volts. A tiny amount of energy.
Now, the key part to remember here, is that when a bond is formed, then the same amount of energy is released into the surroundings, frequently as heat, but sometimes in other forms, such as a photon of light. Since a chemical reaction frequently involves both breaking and forming bonds, we can, once we have data on bond energies, calculate how much energy is consumed by a given chemical reaction. We first sum all the energies required to break the bonds in the reactants - let’s call this R. Then we sum all the energies liberated by the formation of new bonds in the products - let’s call this P. The energy consumed by the reaction is therefore given simply by:
R - P
and in an elementary treatment, we can refer to this as the enthalpy of reaction. (The subject is, as actual chemists in the audience know, more complicated, not least because there are other enthalpies to consider, but this elementary treatment will suffice for my exposition).
This enthalpy is represented symbolically as ΔH in the chemistry literature. So, you will frequently see something like:
ΔH = -54 kJ mol-1
attached to a chemical equation.
Now, if R above is greater than P, then ΔH is greater than zero, and is a measure of how much energy the reaction consumes from the surroundings. Such reactions are known as endothermic reactions. To drive such reactions forward, an external energy source is required, and frequently, chemists provide this by heating their reaction mixtures, though other possibilities exist, such as passing an electrical discharge through the mixture, or subjecting the mixture to UV radiation. Indeed, both electrochemisty and photochemistry are substantial and intricate subdivisions of chemistry in their own right, but I digress. The key point here is that for an endothermic reaction, ΔH is a positive value, indicating that the reaction consumes energy from the surroundings.
On the other hand, if R is less than P, then the reaction, instead of consuming energy, is liberating surplus energy into the surroundings, frequently as heat. Such a reaction is known as an exothermic reaction, and for such reactions, ΔH is less than zero, indicating that instead of consuming energy, it’s producing energy. For an exothermic reaction, ΔH is a negative value.
From the above, it should be obvious that any exothermic reaction, once it starts, is self-sustaining, because there’s always spare energy for more bond breaking available once the reaction is underway. An endothermic reaction, of course, will require an energy input in order to drive it forward, but this need not be a hurdle if the energy input required is modest - if, for example, sunlight heating a puddle of reactants to 30°C is sufficient to drive forward an endothermic abiogenesis reaction, then that reaction will take place. Consequently, fake creationist “probability” calculations simply don’t apply.
Of course, the astute will recognise that the moment we have multiple reagents present, then probability might have some input, but at this point, if you’re dealing with trillions of molecules of said reactants, the Serial Trials Fallacy tells us that we need to be careful about dismissing possibilities on the basis of fake probability calculations.
Of course, there’s a lot more to be said on the subject of, say, nucleotide coupling to form RNA, and how we move from a collection of nucleotides to a self-replicating RNA, but scientists have already demonstrated that this is prebiotically plausible, as the numerous papers on the subject I referenced in my origin of life dissertation in another thread demonstrate amply. The research has been done, and the results are pretty much conclusive to anyone reading those papers honestly.
So, even before we consider self-organisation and self-assembly, elementary chemistry and a proper understanding of probability destroys creationist apologetics on this matter wholesale.
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I’ve placed a folder on my desktop and titled it Calilasseira.
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We can’t make these in a prebiotic synthesis:
Monomeric sugars (builds carbohydrates)
Homochiral Amino acids (builds proteins)
Nucleotides (builds, DNA and RNA)
Glycerol, fatty acids (builds lipids)
This is a bare faced lie.
In my article on the origin of life, I provided references to eighty two peer reviewed scientific papers describing the experimental syntheses of all of these compounds.
Do you bother paying attention to facts when they are presented to you?
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Oh look, I’ve now added yet more scientific papers to my collection as a result of fact checking your lies.
Prebiotic sugar synthesis? Oh look … two papers immediately jumped out from the requisite Google search:
Prebiotic Synthesis Of Simple Sugars By Photoredox Systems Chemistry by Dougal Ritson & John D. Sutherland, Nature Chemistry, 4: 895-899 (30th September 2012)
Prebiotic Sugar Formation Under Nonaqueous Conditions And Mechanochemical Acceleration by Saskia Lamour, Sebastian Pallmann, Maren Haas and Oliver Trapp, Life (Basel), 9(20: 52-62 (June 2019)
The second of those papers is freely available to view online here. The abstract of the first of those two papers reads as follows:
Note that the first of those papers dates from 2012, which means we’ve known that prebiotic sugar synthesis is possible for eleven years.
Both papers provide in detail, relevant reaction mechanisms, illustrating the pathways in question.
A third article I found is this one from a textbook:
The Role Of Silicates In The Synthesis Of Sugars Under Prebiotic Conditions by Joseph Lambert and Senthil Andavan Guruswamy-Thangavelu, Bio-Inspired Silicon-Based Materials, 19-25
I note with interest that one of the researchers is John D. Sutherland, whom I’ve already cited as an author of five scientific papers covering experimental prebiotic synthesis of nucleotides.
Looks like those lies are unravelling at an alarming rate …
EDIT … I’ve just found another paper, namely this one:
Role Of Clays In The Prebiotic Synthesis Of Sugar Derivatives From Formamide by Raffaelle Saladino, Veronica Neri and Claudia Crestini, Philosophical Magazine, 90(17-18):, 2329-2337 (30th March 2010)
That paper is freely downloadable from the journal here.
Ah, don’t you just love science?
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Obh obh, “@whoareyou” is going to get a smack. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
If you are given information in response to a query (or flat out falsity in your case) it is wise to actually read the reply, not only READ it but also comprehend it. Otherwise, well, I think you see how it appears to this forum.
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Enjoy my little exposition on prebiotic sugar synthesis above … 
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