Tour replies to recent Origin of Life (OOL) 'breakthroughs'

[confused2]

I would agree that the chances of cooking up the sort of organism that took (maybe) half a billion years to evolve (this is where Tour has set the bar) are as close to zero as makes no difference. Personally I'd be happy with something that looks like, given half a billion years, it could do what 'life' actually did.

[confused2]

Just an additional note about (Nobel prizewinner) Frances Arnold - she stews up bacteria to what she wants them to do rather than what they originally intended to do. I'm guessing at the numbers - hence the question marks.
She irradiates 1 million (?) bacteria and (on a petri dish) selects the one that performs best. From that one (1 in 10^20) she grows a million (?) . This takes about a week (?) and she repeats the process to get a 1 in 10^40 product. After another week she has a 1 in 10^60 best in class. After 6 weeks she has a 1 in 10^100 best in class. Her claim (I've heard her talk) is that it is quicker to let the bacteria work out how to do what you want them to do than than attempt to 'design' them to do it.

[Kornee]

Just an additional note about (Nobel prizewinner) Frances Arnold - she stews up bacteria to what she wants them to do rather than what they originally intended to do.  I'm guessing at the numbers - hence the question marks.
She irradiates 1 million (?) bacteria and (on a petri dish) selects the one that performs best. From that one (1 in 10^20) she grows a million (?) . This takes about a week (?) and she repeats the process to get a 1 in 10^40 product. After another week she has a 1 in 10^60 best in class. After 6 weeks she has a 1 in 10^100 best in class. Her claim (I've heard her talk) is that it is quicker to let the bacteria work out how to do what you want them to do than than attempt  to  'design' them to do it.

I cannot follow the math. One in 10^6 is just that - how does that also equal one in 10^20? How does that yield a further jump to one in 10^40 and so on in leaps of 10^20 each repeat artificial selection? Of living bacteria not prebiotic molecules btw. Is that supposed to represent e.g., after second repeat, the equivalent of a Darwinian selection from 10^60 chance genetic variations?!

Frances Arnold's evident relevance here is in Directed evolution?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_evolution

How does any of that bear on OOL? As Tour repeatedly emphasizes, chemicals have no life directed goal to pursue. One mistake along the haphazard way and it's curtains for that hopeful monster. The chances for a mistake rise exponentially with both time and molecular complexity. That's a build mistake. We are not even discussing degradation processes - poisoning, UV bond breakages etc. Everything is heavily stacked against even a rudimentary self-replicator surviving in a realistic prebiotic early Earth.

[confused2]

I cannot follow the math. One in 10^6 is just tha

Sorry, for reasons unknown I was thinking base 2 and should have written 2^20.

The chances for a mistake rise exponentially with both time and molecular complexity.

This seems to be a good way of trying out billions of possibilities in a relatively short time. Anything that sticks to the wall goes through to the next round - that's a fierce selection process.

[C C]

[...]

The chances for a mistake rise exponentially with both time and molecular complexity.

This seems to be a good way of trying out billions of possibilities in a relatively short time.  Anything that sticks to the wall goes through to the next round - that's a fierce selection process.

With many copies of the original successful pattern still being in play, too, until a truly top champion replaced them. A "mutated" replicator could not endure the competition for floating components unless it had either an advantage or an inferior success rate (that nevertheless allowed it to survive as a minority). If its capacity for assembling copies of itself was completely broken, then an impotent replicator like that thereby does not rob the surrounding chemical resources for duplicating its own ineffective pattern. 

In the course of whatever thousands or millions of years... Once proto-cells formed and those in turn developed into full-fledged protective cells, gradual colonization and survival beyond the initial shielding habitat (and chemical flow providing molecular components) could proceed. Of course, some contend that rudimentary membranes already co-existed in whatever incubating environment, and were necessary at the start. 

https://www.visionlearning.com/en/librar...ife-II/227

Fatty acids will spontaneously form membranes when placed in water, and the resulting sacs can grow, divide, and play host to chemical reactions. Thus, the first protocells may have simply involved combining basic biochemistry that could have formed spontaneously.

[...] Membranes are made of lipids, which existed on the ancient Earth, alongside amino acids, sugars, and nitrogenous bases. [...] Holding the building blocks inside, those compartments would have acted as nature’s laboratories, and this scenario would have been vital to the origin of living cells.

- - - - - - Enriched geothermal and flowing deep sea hydrothermal chemical sources, now dominated by extremophile non-precusor or legit life - - - - - -

https://www.whoi.edu/know-your-ocean/oce...mal-vents/

In 1977, scientists made a stunning discovery on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean: vents pouring hot, mineral-rich fluids from beneath the seafloor. They later found the vents were inhabited by previously unknown organisms that thrived in the absence of sunlight. These discoveries fundamentally changed our understanding of Earth and life on it...

[...] Instead of relying on photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into organic carbon, the [hydrothermal vent] bacteria use chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide to provide the energy source that drives their metabolic processes...

https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/deep-sea...ts-pumping

Green sulfur bacteria are unique among hydrothermal vent bacteria because they require both chemical energy (from hydrogen sulfide) and light energy to survive. Green sulfur bacteria contain chlorosomes, organelles that are so efficient at harvesting light that green sulfur bacteria can grow at much lower light intensities than other light-requiring microbes. There is no sunlight at hydrothermal vents, and instead they capture energy from the weak radioactive glow emitted from geothermally heated rock.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/...88.article

But not everyone agrees that life began in deep sea hydrothermal systems. [...] Mulkidjanian thinks life could have sprung from geothermal systems, such as the Siberian Kamchatka geothermal fields in the Russian Far East...

[...] One other point of contention is the presence or absence of ultraviolet (UV) light. This could be a strong influence in a terrestrial origin scenario with no protective ozone layer on the early earth, but completely absent in the deep sea theory. The relative UV stability of RNA nucleotides suggests selection occurred in UV light – on the earth’s surface not in the sea.

[...] But according to Lane, ‘There is a big problem with life evolving with UV light, which is to say no life today uses UV as an energy source – it tends to destroy molecules rather than promote biochemistry.’ He also argues that the synthetic chemistry proposed in such terrestrial scheme just doesn’t look like life as we know it. ‘It starts with cyanides or with zinc sulfide photosynthesis and you end up with a kind of Frankenstein chemistry,’ Lane says. ‘The chemistry might work but to join that up with life as we know it, I would say is borderline impossible’
Disciplinary divide

Looking closer, the divide between those who support a terrestrial and those supporting an oceanic origin is split between disciplines. Synthetic chemists generally favour a continental origin and geologists and biologist mostly deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Chemists argue it’s impossible to do the chemistry in hydrothermal vents, while biologists argue that the terrestrial chemistry proposed just isn’t like anything seen in biochemistry and doesn’t narrow the gap between geochemistry and biochemistry.

[Kornee]

A reminder of what is actually involved in order for an extant cell to divide and reproduce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwAFZb8juMQ

Good luck with a primitive 'protocell' pulling that one off. Even more basically, a rudimentary lipid vesicle, even if it could miraculously engulf viable self-replicator molecules, thence acts as a death by starvation cage. Real cell membranes have to incorporate many sophisticated protein based highly selective pores. That keep out unwanted molecules, allow in needed ones, and permit expulsion of otherwise deadly waste products.
Quite some combo chicken and egg acts there.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, yet another biological wonder that, umm, would seem to present 'difficulties' for materialists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ5oPL0PqYE
Another chicken and egg head scratcher. Details matters.

[Kornee]

To be fair, the example of cell division linked to last post was the more sophisticated one of Eukaryote cells containing a nucleus.
So let's include the 'simple' Prokaryote version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmFnjRI5H6E
Still light years away from anything a hypothesized primitive 'protocell' = lipid vesicle + miraculously engulfed 'self-replicator' molecules, could ever manage.
Fairy tales for the masses.

[Kornee]

Much more detail on what's involved in 'simple' Prokaryote cell division:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKkOgeumW8E
Imagining that can be a step-by-step evolutionary outcome, starting from a simple lipid vesicle + accidentally enclosed self-replicator molecule(s), is amusing but silly.
All one could actually expect is dissolution after a relatively brief freak existence. For reasons already given.

[confused2]

God falls into the alien category. Assuming life was created by one or more aliens the question remains of how and perhaps equally interesting - why? The precise properties of carbon are probably essential to life as we know it so was the plan (simplfied):
1/Create universe with lots of hydrogen with the right properties to form stars.
2/Create stars with the right properties to create the rest of the elements
3/Create solar system
4/Plant seed for 1 or all creatures
?