Origin of life theory involving RNA–protein hybrid gets new support
nature.com
nature.com
The idea the RNA metabolisms might have evolved in small cavities in hydrothermal vents also makes it easy to imagine communities of cooperating molecules in an enclosed area needing to defend themselves from free-loading virus molecules, setting up the ongoing conflict between cells and viruses right from the beginning, and also a dynamic in which viruses are both destructive and an important source of novelty
Somewhere, a membrane happened. I don't think anywhere in nature today do we find a membrane created entirely from scratch. Everywhere we find a membrane, it grew from and split off of an existing membrane. It may be that we should think of ourselves as fancy membranes, and DNA, RNA, and protein are just clever ways to make more membrane.
Trolling is frowned upon here.
It seems intuitive that this would be how it started, goopy little bubbles filled with goo, just barely keeping out the other goo that would disrupt it.
Literally all the organisms we know about make all the membranes they use by adding to an existing membrane, not fetching them from out of their environment. And really, why should they?
Finally: a soap bubble film has air on both sides, and water solution between, and is thus the opposite of any membrane in a cell, which has water on both sides and glyceride in between.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43128410-the-revoluti...
The book defines the transition from RNA to DNA as a Phenotypic Revolution
Also he tried to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund this book. Neat.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Gari%C3%A...
In particular, free oxygen was practically non-existent. Metals, particularly iron, and metal complexes were dissolved in the water at high concentration. Processes that spawned the first life had to be compatible with all of that, and may well have depended on many details of it, most of which we can barely imagine. The ancestors of everything alive today survived the arrival of free oxygen a billion or two years later, with the loss of most dissolved metals, leaving no trace of the overwhelming majority that failed to adapt to that.
Conditions today, even without competition from existing life, might be wholly unsuitable for biogenesis.
It has three alternatives PNA, TNA and GNA that are somewhat variants of the RNA. (I'm not an expert, but my uninformed opinion is that GNA looks promising.)
Also PHAs that is very different and the iron-sulfur idea that is even more difficult. (I'm not an expert, but my uninformed opinion both look too weird and the transition to DNA is less clear.)
> A shadow biosphere is a hypothetical microbial biosphere of Earth that would use radically different biochemical and molecular processes from that of currently known life. Although life on Earth is relatively well studied, if a shadow biosphere exists it may still remain unnoticed, because the exploration of the microbial world targets primarily the biochemistry of the macro-organisms.
* Prions are like falling domino pieces. If you have a lot of standing domino pieces, and one of them falls, it may cause other domino pieces to fall. But they don't create more domino pieces, or standing pieces. They just pull down the pieces that are around. Also, they store no information, they just flip a bit from 0 to 1.
* RNA is like a small pile of glued magnets glued on their side. If you put some glued magnets in a box full of magnets and shake them, they will pick other magnets and create a inverse copy. If the side of the magnets is (magically) sticky, the copy may get glued permanently. After some more shaking, you have two piles of glued magnets moving around and collecting more magnets and making copies. They store information, because the initial pile may be NNSNSNS and the new piles will have the same pattern until there is an error in the copy.
I think the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis is somewhat similar to your idea. IIUC they don't self reproduce, they just grow in a random order in a pattern. And the proposal is that it 's good to support the RNA bases for a small time to make it easy to build small chains.
[I remember to have read something like that about clay or crystals, but I can't find it now in the article in Wikipedia. Perhaps the idea was abandoned a long time ago.]
Before membraneless RNA viroids were discovered, some abiogenesis researchers may have thought that DNA is fundamentally required for self-replication, so whatever first occurred must have had it. But this is simply a lack of imagination on what RNA can do.
Also, the fact that there are individual proteins that must be found in a search space that is on the order of 10^70, while only 10^50 living organisms have ever existed on Earth puts to rest the “random mutation” theory of how life evolved.
There was a time when mathematicians in the academy openly mocked the biologists who bought into the “random mutation plus natural selection” creation myth, but sadly those days are over because raising the obvious questions now puts an academic career at risk.
It is commonly assumed that it is impossible to definitively prove the existence of God, but in fact the existence of life is a definitive proof of the existence of God, given what we now understand about molecular biology.
Here is an interesting book: The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734183705/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_DA...
Frankly it is game-over for atheism from a strictly empirical perspective.
I think your statements about the protein search space and the number of living organisms are kind of specious. The whole point of evolution is that it can search large spaces effectively- certainly the entire 10**70 (or whatever the size of "protein sequence" or "protein structure" space really is), hasn't been sampled, in the same way that proteins don't explicitly fold by enumerating through every single possible physical conformation.
Nothing about molecular biology proves or supports the argument of the existence of a supreme being.
If you don't mind me asking, at what age?
2. your math seems sketchy but even assuming it's fine - there's no requirement for life to search for these proteins on Earth. Even if it had 10^-20 chance of happening on any given planet - there's more planets than 10^20. It's not surprising that SOMEONE wins the lottery, it's only surprising if a predetermined person wins it.
That doesn't include the several billion other fauna, or the unquantifable number of microorganisms living on/in them or in the water and soil. For example, a liter of water contains a million phytoplankton, half a million zooplankton, and over a billion bacteria. The ocean contains about 10^40 liters, which comes out to over 10^50 living organisms just in terms of bacteria, not including higher-order life forms (or non-living self-organizing organic constructs like viruses).
If anything, you are grossly understating the amount of living organisms currently alive.
According to this calculation, which seems persuasive to me, the "volume of the oceans is about 1.35 billion trillion liters" (https://mathblag.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/how-much-water-is-...)
That comes to 1.35 x 1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000,000, which is on the order of 10^22.
You're clearly ignoring the second paragraph, so I guess the problem with your math is simply that your ignoring everything that disagrees with your worldview.
Also, physicians don't know how many elementary particles there are in the entire universe, since we don't actually know what the bulk of the entire universe is made of yet, so your 10^90 is clearly just made up.
"Titin is a multi-functional protein that behaves as a nonlinear spring in human muscles with its many domains unfolding and refolding in the presence of forces and giving muscles their elasticity. Titin is about 100 times longer than the average protein with its 33,423 amino acid polypeptide chain" (http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-the-average-protein/)
How many different ways are there to create a protein containing 33,423 amino acids? I will leave this calculation as an exercise for the reader, but as a starting point, suppose there are only 10 amino acids available -- that would yield 10^33,423 possible arrangements.
But even an average protein would have more different possible arrangements than there are atoms on Earth.
Given that there are only 10^16 seconds in a billion years, we can safely assume that mutating a protein ten times every second for a billion years will search less than a quadrillionth of the search space.
2. genetic code doesn't change only by 1-base pair at a time. There are duplications, inclusions, etc. I'm pretty sure you can find many duplicated fragments in the code for titin.
3. you have choosen your target (titin) without specifying the class that it belongs to. Maybe it only matters that it's long and the endings are kinda this shape? Let's say there's 10^25_000 different viable titin alternatives. No matter which we end up with - it works, and you wouldn't know if you were in these universes instead. It significantly changes the likelihood but you treat the titin as the only possibility.
It's like being amazed that John Smith won the lottery - sure, it's unlikely that this exact person won. But it's pretty likely that SOMEONE wins the lottery. And you can only be amazed if you chose that person before the draw. In case of titin you select the winner after the draw and marvel at the unlikelihood.
These comparisons are usually motivated ideologically and based on misunderstanding of both probability and universe.
2. Proteins are not genetic code.
3. Let's say there are 4 viable titin alternatives.
Also, what is this about "you wouldn't know if you were in these universes"? Do you think there are other universes? The multiverse hypothesis is a transparent attempt to avoid the conclusion that God exists -- but it has no basis in any science or empiricism of any sort -- it's just an absolutely made up speculative fantasy. The fact that people have to resort to it just drives home how impoverished the materialist framework is -- it only works if there is an infinite number of universes for which there is no evidence. At least having in God is having faith in something for which there is evidence.
Apparently I have the solid statistical reasoning here and you are the one motivated by a "materialism of the gaps" ideology.
If you don't know how many tickets the lottery sells you cannot estimate the probability of winning it. Your assumption that universe ends exactly as far away form us as we can see is absurd, so I pointed it out.
> Proteins are not genetic code.
Proteins are generated from the genetic code, and it's the genetic code that evolves and gets inherited over generations not proteins. Proteins are just an expression of this inherited and mutated code. So it makes more sense to focus on the code and not on the result. And the relationship isn't 1:1. See also "Kolmogorov complexity".
For 1 example - Pi is infinite and non-periodic. But the algorithm to generate Pi to an arbitrary digit is quite simple and short.
> Let's say there are 4 viable titin alternatives.
There's more than that in every single human being. And it changes through life.
> The titin gene (TTN), with its 364 exons, encodes the largest human protein. It gives rise to a dizzying array of alternatively spliced isoforms differentially expressed in various skeletal muscles, heart, and in development.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...
We focus on the ones that lead to sickness, but there are also many that don't.
> Do you think there are other universes?
No. I'm talking about the hypothetical situation in which titin evolved differently. In that case you would think that this version of titin was the only version possible and you would calculate the probability basing on that instead. Yet it's obviously wrong.
> "materialism of the gaps"
It's you who assumes that God must have made it because you don't understand how it could have happened. Depsite your false assumptions about the probability:
1. titin can only works if it's exactly as is (despite the fact there are many working variants present in every single homo sapiens, not to mention inter-species variants)
2. titin could have only evolved in the part of universe that we can see (despite the fact it's obvious there's more universe than that - see gravity distribution)
3. evolution works on proteins directly by changing them 1 particle at a time (despite the fact evolution works on genetic code and not 1 pair at a time)
These assumptions are all false as I've shown above, hence your estimation is useless. It has nothing to do with alternative universes or "gaps".
Fairy tales from illiterates are absolutely not a better theory absent extraordinary evidence to support the hearsay-upon-hearsay-upon-edited-hearsay-upon-hearsay (ad nauseam) claims.
Please, all, don’t let this type of unscientific non-thinking go unchecked.
It’s terrifying that basic science can be dismissed so easily.
Summary about how the test equipment of Miller-Urey wasn’t accounted for in the experiment. “It finds that the precise composition of the apparatus housing the experiment is crucial to amino acid formation.”
General interest science article: https://bigthink.com/hard-science/miller-urey/
Nature.com article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00235-4.pdf
Going from millers early experiments to the LUCA is a larger gap in complexity than going from LUCA to modern man. It is that level of jump we believe to have occurred in just 1-200 million years. We do not currently have a proper explanation for this but there several candidates.
So yes, aliens as in proteins coming from comets, are very much a consideration and you should familiarize with the last few decades of research into the field before trying to be condescending.
In other words, if terrestrial life isn't assumed to have arisen on earth de-novo, then the odds of it arising elsewhere and being transplanted by chance rise considerably, as it only has to happen once on any one of many other worlds that are potentially suitable, and if we extend the thought to Earth perhaps not being a 2nd generation cradle to being a 3rd, or even at a further remove, the odds of life arising spontaneously somewhere start to look darnright favorable, and that is still assuming that we should only consider the emergence of terrestrial life-as-we-know-it rather than anything lifelike, with life-as-we-know-it simply being the one that emerged (or rather, spread) first, at least in our particular parochial corner of the universe.
Edit, to add: and, more importantly, we, as a human race, will glean so much more from exploring scientific explanations vs religious explanations that we should hurry up and move on from the latter before it stultifies us yet again like in dark ages and witch-burning era before we regress even farther than we have.
There are all sorts of areas in which scientific reasoning leads to a conclusion of intelligent design — from examining arrow heads to cryptography to forensic science.
If you hand-wave away skeptical inquiry of a topic, then yes, it can remain within the realm of the supernatural, but that is hardly an endorsement, it simply means you aren't willing to subject the topic to investigation with all the tools at our disposal, or at least are unwilling to eschew tools that have proved unreliable (such as circular logic).
Your argument basically boils down to "The spontaneous emergence of life in a universe consistent with the materialistic and naturalistic worldview is so unlikely that we must attribute it to a cause that cannot be accounted for from within that worldview."
To which I say: "It almost doesn't matter how unlikely the emergence of life is, since if life hadn't emerged we wouldn't be having this argument". This is of course the anthropic principle. Which isn't to say that determining the likelihood isn't important and interesting! Just that it isn't particularly relevant to the question of whether the emergence of life can be explained from within a naturalistic and materialist worldview.
You would have to prove that the emergence of life is not only unlikely, but actually impossible, in order to demonstrate that a non-naturalistic origin is required.
Well, actually, to be thorough, that isn't the only possible avenue of proving your point if view, but other avenues would require more data than we currently have, and would require that data to point in directions that demonstrate the universe having agency and intent of some sort.
You might enjoy the science fiction novel Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer, which riffs a bit on this theme:
Somewhat spoilery summary is on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God
To give a hypothetical example of the kind of future evidence that could support your argument that nevertheless doesn't spoil the plot of that novel, imagine that buried within the non-coding and non-regulatory genomes of many different life forms on earth there were a message (Bible Code style). The message isn't identical everywhere, mutations do degrade it, but just as often over evolutionary times scales mutations correct the errors. There is no explicable mechanism for these corrections, that demonstrate ongoing interference for no reason than the preservation of the message. Furthermore, the message gets longer in larger genomes, and has expanded in similar ways in species otherwise not particularly related, and to an extent that cannot be attributed to known mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer.
Further, imagine that we discover life elsewhere in the solar system (for example on Titan, or Europa). These extraterrestrial life forms don't particularly resemble Earth's, differing in to he chiralitt of their protiens an do sugars, using sightly different genetic coding and transcription mechanisms, but buried within their own junk genes there are, astonishingly similar messages encoded differently, preserved and expanded upon in sync with Earth's over eons, without there being any explicable means of sharing that data and no other between classes that are otherwise incompatible in encoding, metabolism, or basic chemistry (Titan's life uses methane and ethane as solvents instead of water).
That would be a pretty convincing argument for their being a "supernatural" entity being responsible for creating life and chivvying it along. Whether that entity is also responsible for the creation of the universe is a separate argument, but perhaps there is further evidence somehow encoded within the fabric of spacetime's various universal constants (eg. Contact buried a message deep within the digits of Pi).
In short, concluding that God exists is a bit of an iffy proposition that largely relies on a failure of imagination. I prefer to hew to a slightly higher standard, that of demonstrating that God exists.
"God did it" is equally applicable as the answer to every possible question, and is equally useless in every case. Every jot and tittle of progress ever made came from rejecting that answer.
But I here predict that when abiogenesis is solved, you will pivot immediately to a now-diminished god inventing amino acids with innate capacity for evolving life. From there, to carbon; and then hydrogen, and its propensity to make stars that eventually go supernova (for the first few rows of the periodic table) and collapse to neutron stars (that collide to make the rest). It will be a god of Hydrogen. Or maybe of Quarks, Leptons, and Photons, though that seems a little messy. Maybe the devil gets to do Dark Matter?
The domain of the supernatural simply covers less and less things as our collective understanding expands
I also think you are limiting your approach to who you are responding to: athiesm is a belief system about there not being a God, there is a different word for people who just don’t care at all.