Spare me your hypocritical bleating. You’ve been asked to answer pertinent questions repeatedly here, and have responded with obfuscation, bluster and cant.
Stop lying.
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No, but if they wandered in and accidentally heard the word that’s different. I mean it’s not like they are being forced to unwittingly attend churches, and being indoctrinated into irrational archaic superstitious prejudices and bigotries. Or have their educations blighted by creationist lies and propaganda.
Compared to that accidently hearing or reading the odd vituperation is pretty tame. I can’t speak for others but I had heard pretty much all there was in the school playground by the time I was 7 years old, I can’t say it left any lasting damage.
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When speaking of abiogenesis, a few questions occur to me.
I have a few college courses in organic chemistry under my belt, so I can’t claim to be as scientifically informed as many of the people on this forum . . . but there has been talk of comets and meteorites supplying some of the basic chemical building blocks of life to the early Earth.
Rare earth metals such as iridium, palladium, and so forth also occur in many meteorites in much higher concentrations than we would expect in the Earth’s crust. Ths is a part of how we discovered that most dinosaus (except for the birds) were wiped out be a large meteorite, as there is a world-wide layer of iridium that corresponds with this extinction event.
So, my point is that platinum, palladium (and–I assume–iridium) are all really good calaysts for organic componds, which is why platinum is used in car catalytic converters.
Has anyone explored the idea that platinum (or other rare earth metals) may have played a role in abiogenesis by functioning as a catalyst in early biochemistry? Or am I way off base? Catalysts (enzymes) are extremely crucial in almost all of the chemical processes of life, so you can see why I wonder if a catalyst like platinum may have been important in the begining of life . . . especially when there is a lot of talk about comets and meteorites supplying the organic componds for life.
Thank you for considering my question.
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While it’s been demonstrated in the laboratory that elements such as platinum and iridium are excellent catalysts for various organic reactions, there’s one slight problem.
Rarity.
It’s very unusual for a platinum or iridium bearing stratum to be exposed to seawater, simply because such strata are themselves extremely rare. Plus, thanks to the density of these elements, the few strata that are present are almost always of deep magmatic origin.
However, there are much more abundant elements that fit the bill. I’ve already mentioned montmorillonite clay minerals, which usually involve calcium and magnesium ions, and these have already been demonstrated to be excellent catalysts for RNA oligonucleotide synthesis. It’s possible they act as catalysts for other organic reactions as well, but from the standpoint of prebiotic chemistry, this is the best known catalytic role for these minerals by a long shot.
Other minerals implicated in catalytic processes include various iron sulphides - Gunter Wächtershäuser has several papers devoted to this topic, and he may not be alone in investigating Fe/S catalytic chemistry in a prebiotic setting.
Other transition metals that could play a role include nickel, copper and zinc - the latter is heavily utilised by biological enzymes in the present , and there exist entire families of “zinc finger” enzymes in humans alone, which is why zinc is an important dietary trace element.
In a prebiotic and pre-oxygen early Earth, Fe2+ ions are likely to have been significant players, for example. This would have been shut down after the Great Oxygenation Event, because in the presence of oxygen, aqueous Fe2+ are rapidly oxidised to Fe3+ ions, whose compounds are mostly insoluble in water and taken out of the equation via precipitation. Indeed, Fe3+ oxides are ridiculously stable compounds except in the presence of strong acids, and unlike the corresponding sulphides, are not known to exhibit much catalytic activity within organic chemistry.
I would consider iron period transition metals to be much more important players in catalysis than rarities like platinum and iridium, and of course calcium and magnesium step in here also on the basis of both abundance and known catalytic activity.
There may also be roles for manganese, chromium or cobalt, but I would consider these to be of minor importance compared to iron or zinc.
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Thank you for the detailed response, and I do know enough about organic chem to understand your points.
I was just considering that rare earths like platinum may have been more abundant in the distant past because there was a period when Earth was being heavily bombarded by meteorites, and this period roughly corresponds with the origins of life.
But your points about iron sulfides, zinc, nickel, and clay make sense.
Part of the problem with transport of, say, iridium to the Hadean Earth via meteorites is this - iridium is what’s known as a “siderophile”, which means that it readily dissolves in molten iron. Most of the iron making up the molten Hadean Earth descended to form the core, and took most of the limited amount of iridium with it, leaving lighter silicates in the crust.
Which is why the presence of an iridium rich stratum results in raised eyebrows among geologists. Such strata are frequently the products of more recent meteorite visits. See for example the K-T boundary.
I suspect similar remarks apply to platinum, but I would need to check the details on that.
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Thank you again for taking my ideas seriously.
Maybe–one day–a biochemist will come up with a recipie that starts with non-living chemicals and ends with something crawling out of a jar.
And the Creationists can then kiss my ass.
Prebiotic chemists could announce tomorrow that they’ve synthesised a fully functional rhinoceros in a test tube, and creationists will still make up fake excuses to hand-wave away the results.
They’ve dedicated their lives to lying for Magic Man for so long, they won’t be able to stop even if prebiotic chemistry researchers succeed in a one-pot generation of working protocells from the simplest molecules. They’ll make up the usual bullshit apologetics that this was “designed”, even if all you need to do is introduce the molecules to each other, walk out of the lab, and return a week later after it’s all been done on autopilot by the molecules themselves.
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