>From another listserve:
>
>Long before Stuart Kauffman proposed his
>idea of spontaneous organization, perhaps by some as yet undiscovered law
>of nature by which life would form spontaneously....
>
You don't need some mysterious undiscovered law; the known physiochemical
laws do very nicely, thank you. And life did not form spontaneously, but as
the result of a process controlled by a series of mechanisms.
>
>...Fred Hoyle & Chandra
>Wickramasinghe had already disposed of it. After estimating that the
>chances of a primitive cell forming from abiotic material is about 10^
>-40,000...
>
Assuming that all the molecules came together at once to spontaneously form
a cell out of "nothing", which of course is not what would have happened.
But then what is the chance that you would get one functional protein by
taking six genes, randomly cutting them up into at least a dozen pieces,
then randomly mixing and reassembling these pieces into millions of new
genes? I don't know, but it must be better than we might suppose,
considering that the researchers who do it can get hundreds of functional
proteins, about a dozen of which have superior or novel catalytic abilities.
>
>...they said the following.
>
>"If there were some deep principle of nature which drove organic systems
>toward living systems, the existence of the principle should easily be
>detectable in the laboratory.
>
It is; it has been; and we are steadily working out the details.
>
>This applies whether the principle is one of
>'seeing' and 'recognition' in the sense described above, or of concealed
>intelligence in other forms. One might seek for instance to claim that when
>amino acids polymerize into chains their orderings are not random, and
>likely enough it is true that the orderings are not completely random.
>
Except that frameshift mutations randomly scramble amino acid sequences, yet
you occasionally get functional proteins that catalyze novel reactions.
Except that you can randomly cut related proteins into pieces, randomly mix
and reassemble those pieces, and still get functional proteins with superior
catalytic ability or novel catalytic ability.
>
>But
>orderings that are not completely random remain a far cry from supposing
>that amino acids 'know' how to link themselves together so as to produce
>the enzymes and other critical polypeptides.
>
Except that thermal copolymerization of mixtures of amino acids produce
polypeptides with catalytic capabilities. As such, either random assemblies
of amino acids have a better chance of creating functional polypeptides than
we suppose, or the amino acids do "know" how to polymerize to produce useful
catalysis.
>
>Such a notion of
>self-instruction by amino acids is an obviously wild proposal, but to
>disprove it decisively one must again turn to experiment. The ratio of the
>volume of the whole ocean to a chemist's test-tube is a number with only
>some 22 digits, so that using a test-tube of organic soup instead of the
>whole ocean of organic soup postulated in conventional biology, should
>merely lop 22 digits off the 40,000 digits which represent the information
>content of the enzymes, leaving 39,978 digits, essentially the same number
>as before. Nor does the length of time of an experiment matter
>significantly, even if the process of the origin of life were very strongly
>accelerating, say like the hundredth power of the time, (time)^100. Thus
>the reduction in the information accumulated in an hour instead of 1,000
>million years would then be a number with some 1,300 digits, which would
>merely reduce the original 40,000 digits to 38,700, an information content
>that should be overwhelmingly detectable. An experiment done in
>half-a-morning, starting from simple organic ingredients, should therefore
>generate most, if not all, of the explicit structures of the enzymes.
>Needless to say, no such experiment has been successfully performed....
>
Not the kind they specify, no, because they demand that the experiment
produce a large majority of all the modern enzymes known. However,
experiments like they describe have produced a far more limited number of
catalytic polypeptides or RNA molecules, so we benighted atheist
evolutionists must being something right.
>
>...showing that the enzymes did not arise by self-instruction or self
>recognition, if indeed a disproof of these rather absurd ideas were
needed."
>
More appeal from ignorance fallacy, with a healthy dose of appeal from
personal incredulity fallacy thrown in for good measure. Fortunately, the
universe doesn't have to operate the way they claim it should, so the rest
of us can continue to successfully investigate abiogenetic mechanisms if we
so desire. Stay tuned for further developments.
Kevin L. O'Brien