>Joyce's work could have been replicated by a single contaminating
>bacterium. If it takes his supermolecule 5 minutes to cleave DNA, and they
>are in fact random cleavages, how is that going to contribute anything to
>the origin of life.
I would respond with 2 things: First, the bacteria has had 3.5 billion years
of selection to look for a better solution than Joyce was able to find in 2
years. Second, this is a property that ribozymes don't have in nature as I
understand the situation. Joyce wanted to evolve an ability that didn't
exist in nature.
So I am not surprised that better solutions can be found. The point is that
functionality is spread far more widely throughout sequence space than
Christians teach.
I would look maybe for a molecule that had the ability
>to put DNA together, not cut it apart, and put it together in such a way
>that the sequence had meaning in terms of protein. Then you have a
>significant molecule. Lots and lots of non biological chemical reagents
>have the ability to cleave DNA a lot faster than Joyce's molecule, and a
>lot more specifically as well. In fact the whole Maxim-Gilbert method of
>sequencing DNA by chopping it at specific base pairs is based on this
>effect. Joyce is still in the dark ages. But lest you be tempted to
>suggest that the chemical process is more evidence of ease of developing
>molecules with specificity, I would (needlessly) remind you that they are
>just helping things go downhill faster. What we need is a way to get
>things to go the other way by a mechanism that will at the same time impart
>specific information content to the molecules. Now that we don't have. Yet.
But Art, you miss the whole point of the example. I am not trying to prove
that life originated from molecules (although this has implications in that
regard). I do not have the ability to put together a origin of life
scenario. I am trying to show that the classic probability argument that
Christians put forth is very flawed. The standard arguments makes two
erroneous assumptions:
First they assume that a molecule either works or doesn't work, on or off, 0
or 1. But functionality is not the simple. Some work, albeit slowly, other
work rapidly.
Secondly they asume generally that only one sequence will work. Both of
these assumptions are wrong.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm