Ok, Kevin, where was Fox when this was all presumably taking place on the
primitive earth? Who obtained and purified the amino acids, and measured
and mixed the purified amino acids, and maintained the conditions and
temperature just right? As for catalytic, that certainly is not
demonstrated to my satrisfaction. One of his grad students who was
involved in the experiments urged Fox to use sterile conditions for the
experiments, but he didn't. The student calculated that the presence of
one bacterium in the mixture could have accounted for all the catalytic
activity observed by Fox. Asa for relevance, most paleobiogeochemists
reject Fox's work as irrelevant to abiogenesis. You should join them.
>
>As for the question of control, I assume that, clever biochemist though he
>was, Fox could not control the physiochemical mechanisms of nature, and
>therefore could not force amino acids to polymerize against their will into
>catalytic molecules. But since you were a student of his you would know him
>better than I would, so I guess I could be wrong.
Sounds to me like Fox was doing exactly that: manipulating the
physicochemical mechanisms of nature to produce a result that could not
have occurred in an abiogenic setting at all. You decide whether you are
wrong.
Art
http://biology.swau.edu