RE: The Evolutionist: Liar, Believer In Miracles, King of

Brian D Harper (bharper@postbox.acs.ohio-state.edu)
Fri, 06 Nov 1998 17:51:17 -0500

At 10:41 AM 11/6/98 -0700, Kevin wrote:
>Greetings Art:
>
>I love the way you try to push my buttons so as to get me mad and lash out
at you, while still raising valid points. That takes real political talent;
I congratulate you.
>
>"Where on the primitive earth are you going to find a mixture of amino
acids that is 2/3 aspartic and glutamic and 1/3 of the other 18 amino acids
and has no non-amino acid organic compounds in it...including sugars???"
>
>Who (besides you) has ever claimed that these precise exact conditions, and
only these precise exact conditions, are needed to get proteinoids or
microspheres? Certainly not Fox or his colleagues. If you read the
literature on proteinoids instead of relying on your personal limited
experience you would find that proteinoids have been created under a variety
of conditions, including the presence of contaminants like sugars, and with
different concentrations of amino acids. As I've already mentioned, there
is good evidence to say that proteinoids can occur under a range of
conditions. Besides, aspartic and glutamic acid are two of the easiest
amino acids to make abiotically; I do not doubt that they would be present
in high concentrations.
======================>>>>>>

I don't doubt that you don't doubt it. I do, however, doubt that
you have calibrated your doubtometer recently. :-)

I have in front of me a paper by Stanley Miller giving the yields
of various amino acids for various environments. For the "best
case" environment (strongly reducing) the total yield of organics
is about 15% (the % is wrt the amount of carbon converted). The
number one in terms of % yield is formic acid (4%), second is
Glycine (2.1%) then Glycolic acid (1.9%), Alanine (1.7%), Lactic
acid (1.6%) and the numbers get very small after this. Both
Glutamic acid (0.051%) and Aspartic acid (0.024%) occur toward
the bottom of the list.

And this is the best case.

"There is considerable opinion that strongly reducing conditions
were never present on the primitive earth, but this would mean
that the organic compounds must have been brought in on comets
and meteorites, and this assumption has its own set of problems."
--S.L. Miller, 1992, "The Prebiotic Synthesis of Organic Compounds
as a Step Toward the Origin of Life," in _Major Events in the History
of Life_, J.W. Schopf, ed., pp. 1-28.

Examples of the "considerable opinion":

"Support for the view long held by geologists [1] that the
primitive atmosphere was an almost neutral mixture of the
volatiles CO2, H2O, N2 and CO is now evident in the
literature [42,66].
-- Henderson-Sellers, "The Chemical Composition and Climatology
of the Earth's Early Atmosphere," in <Cosmochemistry and the
Origin of Life>, C. Ponnamperuma (ed.), Reidel, 1983.

"Life arose on Earth within a billion years (1 Ga) after
planetary acretion and core formation. The geological record,
which begins 3.8 Ga BP, indicates environmental conditions
much like today's, except for the absence of oxygen."
-- S. Chang "Planetary Environments and the Conditions
of Life," Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 325:601-610 (1988).

If you check the Miller paper cited above you'll find that
the yields drop way down for mildly reducing atmospheres.
Typically less than 0.1% total yield, some times less than
0.001%.

Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Applied Mechanics
The Ohio State University

"He who establishes his arguments
by noise and command shows that
reason is weak" -- Montaigne