Spontaneously formed RNA 'breakthrough' - abiogenesis now all but solved?

[Kornee]

And...hot off the press:
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-scientists...-mars.html
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2022.0027
Read the fine print there before concluding 'we have finally cracked the problem of unguided abiogenesis'. Not even remotely close. Spontaneous formation of lengthy RNA strands is a big surprise. But is far from establishing life could have sprang from it. A key passage from first article linked to above:

""Important questions remain," cautions Benner. "We still do not know how all of the RNA building blocks came to have the same general shape, a relationship known as homochirality." Likewise, the linkages between the nucleotides can be variable in the material synthesized on basaltic glass. The import of this is not known."

The import is there is no good reason to suppose these spontaneously formed RNA strands contain other than random thus zero biologically useful information. Zero ability to lead to actual, robust self-replicating life.
Once again, a short course setting out (now only nearly) all the real issues militating against materialistic abiogenesis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71dqAFUb-v0 (links in description to all the following episodes)

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Tour's personal religious commitment is imo a sign of compartmentalized thinking. Which however in no way undermines the veracity of his arguments re abiogenesis, seen from the perspective and experience of a highly accomplished synthetic chemist.

[confused2]

When I was at school I was taught that every chemical reaction occurs at a rate proportional to its probability - has that changed in the last 60 years? Even in unpromising gunk there may be an interesting (self-replicating) combination that occurs (say) once every billion years.

[Kornee]

When I was at school I was taught that every chemical reaction occurs at a rate proportional to its probability - has that changed in the last 60 years? Even in unpromising gunk there may be an interesting (self-replicating) combination that occurs (say) once every billion years.

As Tour forcefully puts it - the inflated 'breakthrough' claims are replete with lies of omission. Especially in the pop-sci articles, there is systematic avoidance of just how either outright difficult the synthesis of a given organic molecule is, and/or how delicate and subject to environmental poisoning such precursors to anything truly biological useful are. This leaves out the still far from solved issue of lack of needed homochirality, and in general lack of any actual useful informational content.

As for unpromising gunk, that's exactly the swept aside finding in the original Miller-Urey experiment. The red-brown goo as Edward Peltzer, who directly worked on that trail-blazing stuff back in the 1950s, goes into here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xj4UH0RwcM
'Cut an apple in half - and wait'. An innocent sounding intro to the issue of Maillard reactions and how that impacts any prospect of unguided chemical evolution towards life.

[confused2]

If you've ever done any practical organic chemistry you'll know that there is almost always some gunk at the bottom of the test-tube - this is all the reactions that you didn't want having proceeded at a rate proportional to their probability. There might be just a few molecules (or one or none) of some of the less likely outcomes. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think Dr Tour would describe the synthesis of low yeild molecules as 'very difficult' because the aim of a 'synthesis' is to produce the desired result as (preferably) a majority product rather than something you might find in among a load of other gunk if you were lucky. In general complex molecules are easy to synthesise though you might get very little of each and they will be difficult to separate and (often) difficult to wash off the side of a test-tube. The point of stewing up promising seeming ingredients isn't that you're going to get a bucket full of self-replicating molecules - you might get one or none and most likely it won't actually replicate because the conditions for formation and the conditions for replication are unlikely to be the same - to say nothing of it being suspended in a soup of other gunk.
While Dr Tour may be correct that it would not be possible for a molecule with the right properties for self-replication to occur in nature as a majority product this is actually a smoke screen to hide what he knows about minority products.

[Kornee]

If you've ever done any practical organic chemistry you'll know that there is almost always some gunk at the bottom of the test-tube - this is all the reactions that you didn't want having proceeded at a rate proportional to their probability. There might be just a few molecules (or one or none) of some of the less likely outcomes. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think Dr Tour would describe the synthesis of low yeild molecules as 'very difficult' because the aim of a 'synthesis' is to produce the desired result as (preferably) a majority product rather than something you might find in among a load of other gunk if you were lucky. In general complex molecules are easy to synthesise though you might get very little of each and they will be difficult to separate and (often) difficult to wash off the side of a test-tube. The point of stewing up promising seeming ingredients isn't that you're going to get a bucket full of self-replicating molecules - you might get one or none and most likely it won't actually replicate because the conditions for formation and the conditions for replication are unlikely to be the same - to say nothing of it being suspended in a soup of other gunk.
While Dr Tour may be correct that it would not be possible for a molecule with the right properties for self-replication to occur in nature as a majority product this is actually a smoke screen to hide what he knows about minority products.

Tour isn't hiding any inconvenient truths on his side of the overall argument. The best effort to date lab constructed 'minority products' are never up to scratch as viable candidates for self-replicator cell-wall-less 'pre-cellular' 'life'. And even if a few such miraculously got to that level naturally, they would be under constant degradative attack. Those Maillard reactions and similar that Peltzer goes into.
In other words, everything we know about a realistic early Earth environment would spell doom for even an ideal lab created, but pre cellular, self-replicating-under-ideally-maintained-conditions, miracle molecule. Dropped into an early Earth 'by hand' scifi saga style (think start of Prometheus flick).

None of these show stoppers will blunt the mainstream abiogenesis research community/industry of course. Exclude any non-materialistic influence as possible, and there is no choice but to optimistically soldier on. Presenting even minor advances as major 'breakthroughs'. That way government grant funds continue to flow in. Careers continue. Call me a cynic if you like.

[confused2]

In fairness the 'all reactions to the extent of their probability' does allow for some sugars - I'm not sure whether or not Tour is invoking them specifically to attack another molecule he doesn't believe in. But no matter.

Basically the evidence that I see with my own eyes supports abiogenisis whereas Tour and others take the same evidence to prove the existence of God. I favour low-level research as the result is 'interesting' but hardly one of the greatest questions facing mankind - God will survive the discovery (or creation) of a self-replicating molecule - not least because he (or she) planned it that way.

[C C]

[...] Basically the evidence that I see with my own eyes supports abiogenisis whereas Tour and others take the same evidence to prove the existence of God. I favour low-level research as the result is 'interesting' but hardly one of the greatest questions facing mankind - God will survive the discovery (or creation) of a self-replicating molecule - not least because he (or she) planned it that way.

And there's no [initial] option but abiogenesis, in the context of the overarching guidelines (or philosophical bias) that science is bound to: Methodological naturalism or "materialism", as Lewontin chose to term it below.

Even panpspermia (at the interstellar level) and intervention by extraterrestrials skirts on the fringe of that, since those explanations would simply pass the buck on as to how life arose naturally -- to places so far away that they can't be investigated. So it's better to assume self-replication processes were spawned on Earth or the local neighborhood, until [slash if] a blatant, alternative smoking gun appeared.

The public mistakenly conflates how this professional field operates (its restricted approach to puzzle-solving) with some kind of ultimate truth or reality. Imagine how ludicrous it would be if the vocational limits of carpentry or welding were extended to the goals and purposes of all human practices and thought orientations -- universally exalted to that kind of pedestal.

"Methodological naturalism, and even sci-fi possibilities within that used only as a last resort" is simply a regulating condition that the enterprise of science functions under. Just as board games or sports like football and basketball follow their own rules/criterion.

Robert Lewontin: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." --review of Carl Sagan's Billions and Billions of Demons ... Jan 9, 1997 NYT

[confused2]

Either in a link or explicitly: Kornee has mentioned cell walls. I suspect (any info invited) that no organism existing now can create a cell wall from scratch - it would simply 'die' without it - maintain yes, create no. Looking at wikipedia on cell walls it looks like there are several designs which don't (to me) look like one is is a development of the other - like there's many ways to skin a cat and we can still see (can we?) that cell walls 'arose' not once but several times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_wall

[Kornee]

Robert Lewontin: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." --review of Carl Sagan's Billions and Billions of Demons ... Jan 9, 1997 NYT

Nice quote. Putting all the cards on the table is somewhat rare.

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Either in a link or explicitly: Kornee has mentioned cell walls. I suspect (any info invited) that no organism existing now can create a cell wall from scratch - it would simply 'die' without it - maintain yes, create no. Looking at wikipedia on cell walls it looks like there are several designs which don't (to me) look like one is is a development of the other - like there's many ways to skin a cat and we can still see (can we?) that cell walls 'arose' not once but several times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_wall

My bad for not having used the term 'cell membrane' rather than 'cell wall'. As the Wikipedia article points out, cell *walls* are not ubiquitous in all cellular life. But cell *membranes* are.

[confused2]

My bad for not having used the term 'cell membrane' rather than 'cell wall'. As the Wikipedia article points out, cell *walls* are not ubiquitous in all cellular life. But cell *membranes* are.

My mistake - I thought the cell wall was the cell membrane. With the variation in cell wall design I was thinking along the lines that 'life' was invented more than once. Unfortunately for this line of speculation the cell membrane looks like it might have been a 'once only' trick. As to whether anything 'living' now can make a cell membrane from scratch - I'm just interested.

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Cells can certainly repair a membrane though it doesn't look 'simple' ..

Plasma membrane repair is a conserved cellular response mediating active resealing of membrane disruptions to maintain homeostasis and prevent cell death and progression of multiple diseases. Cell membrane repair repurposes mechanisms from various cellular functions, including vesicle trafficking, exocytosis, and endocytosis, to mend the broken membrane.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4630197/