... but it's awfully important. Early work, such as Urey and Miller in the 1950's showed that plain old lightning in the atmosphere of the primitive earth would produce organic compounds including 11 amino acids (used to make proteins in living cells) plus sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids. Yes, you get all that just from thunderstorms in the atmosphere of the early earth.
So, many of the raw materials of life are easily produced. But how can some of them come together, chemically, into information-carrying RNA and DNA?
This way: http://tinyurl.com/qjoged
Oh no, not the typewriter monkeys again!
ReplyDeleteWhile some of that seems to indeed be based on ongoing research, I doubt that "with vats the size of oceans, random chance will eventually ram every option together" is. Or maybe the whole thing is a spoof?
No, it's quite serious.
ReplyDeleteIf humans, in a few years, can get the right sequences to happen, they're saying it's plausible for the same things to happen naturally, if you start with whole oceans-full of primordial goop and let it slosh around for extremely and long time.
Remember: All of human history is maybe 12,000-14,000 years; recorded history about half that.
The Earth had half a billion years--- 500,000,000 years--- before life appeared. That's a long, long, long time for even low-probability events to happen.
And the new science shows that the odds are actually pretty good.
Wow, Fred, that's fascinating news, and thanks for posting it. Not that I thought there was any other explanation, but to demonstrate it in a lab is brilliant.
ReplyDeleteAlthough clearly, of course, they've left out the important part. There wasn't a single mention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster touching the nucleotides with His Noodly Appendage in the whole piece.
Ah, but nothing in the new findings refute the FSM, either. And if the process was started by a Noodly Appendage, we have the delightful prospect of adding "Succulent Design" to the list of creation theories.
ReplyDeleteLet there be.... Parmesan!
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(Haven't heard of the FSM? Arrrr! Click here, arrrrr! http://tinyurl.com/8vp3f )