Origin of Life (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, December 24, 2009, 20:04 (5244 days ago) @ David Turell


> What you are missing in organic chemistry is that organic reactions between molecules usually need enzymes for many reactions or the reactions can take millions of years to happen. You are correct about inorganic chemistry.
> > -David, I've taken a semester of Organic, enough to know that the reactions themselves still happen as I've stated. (When the energy in the system hits the "magic number" it will proceed spontaneously.) Also remember that the process of "nonlife to life" is going to be a mix of organic and inorganic chemistry. -Even if we take organic reactions by themselves, enzymes simply lower the energy barrier for otherwise nonreactive components. How much background energy was really present? The only way to answer that is to find a "proto-earth" nearby and explore its chemistry. -I also forgot to mention another factor in my description: Entropy. As the universe ages, information is permanently lost. This directly affects the total number of particles available for its computation. In other words, as time goes forward the number of possible combinations decreases. This should make sense, however, as the combinations possible during the Big Bang can only have happened when matter was as compacted as it was. This also affects the numbers we're talking about. -
> > However, what are the chances for life to appear? You can't answer this question until you find a mechanism for life coming from non life. This is because the only thing we can study--biochemistry--is POST-LIFE. It's a circular study. Everything we can study is the result of 4.5Billion years of evolution; there's no way to tell for sure that the life we have now is the same as it was when it started. We can't make that claim.
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> > I will gladly read Shapiro--it's well overdue. My only hope is that he too, provides the complete mathematical background for his treatise.
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> His example I quoted uses an imaginary organism with four amino acids, 10 enzymes, and each enzyme only 25 amino acids long. This is ridiculously simplistic. Enzymes are usually in the hundreds to thousands. The simplest cells we know are way more complex than that. And Shapiro ignores the fact that only left-handed amino acids can be used. Who knows what the odds become then for his imaginary organisms.-But as I've already stated--the models discussed by Dembski at the least still only assume 1 attempt per second in a given time in a given place. Even in organic chemistry, this won't be the case.

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