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Originally Posted by mo42
There is a simple mechanism, and can be provided by an intelligent force with only moderate power. What needs to be provided is a small amount of kinetic force, guiding specific molecules together. Moving molecules together in just the right fashion can lead to the beginnings of life, and also guide mutations, if the being desired it.
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So what's the mechanism? Where's the actual science here? You say that a small amount of kinetic force can bring molecules together, so what's the mechanism of this action?
How can we tell that an intelligent being has done this? What sort of fashion and through what processes can this occur? Does the intelligent designer go in and tinker with all creature or just some? Why?
Where's the actual positive evidence of this occuring?
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Originally Posted by mo42
Unlikely, you say? Yes, I'll admit that. But the likelihood of things like ribose, any protein with any use, or deoxyribose looks even less likely to me. Even over the course of 3 billion years.
First you need an adequate supply of amino acids (and they are not very plentiful on our planet outside of current life forms; you'd be working with exceedingly low percentages), and then you'd need those amino acids to spontaneously join together in a chain (not particularly likely; water will degrade cleave a protein into its individual components over a relatively short amount of time) and this chain would have to fold into an enzyme capable of catalyzing ribose production. You would need other enzymes to continue the ribose creation process, using the products of the original enzyme complex. In order to get a protein with this function, a very specific protein would have to be formed from the amino acids.
Modern organisms require at least 8 enzymes for ribose production (just looked that one up again) from products that might exist in small quantities in the primoridal soup. These enzymes average to be about 300 amino acids in length. Even assuming there was somehow a better enzyme that existed in the soup that was only 50 amino acids long, the odds of that 50 amino acid chain being created is one in 20^50, which comes out to 11 with 64 zeroes after it. A billion has 9 zeroes after it. Odds are freaking low for the "random amino acids came together to make good proteins which made components for RNA and then RNA came together in useful chains that were capable of catalyzing replication which eventually graduated into DNA" theory.
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This isn't actually your argument, is it? I mean, you might have written it out yourself and what not, but you didn't actually come up with it did you?
I ask because I encountered a very similar argument a few weeks ago, on another board and I remember thinking at the time that these numbers would have been too astounding for the supporters of abiogenesis to ignore. I then realized that you are skipping a bunch of steps in assuming that you just jump from non-life to a more complex type of life required.
Then I went on to talkorigins and found this:
which I think is very relevant to the discussion.
In any event, I have to agree with the author's conclusion:
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At the moment, since we have no idea how probable life is, it's virtually impossible to assign any meaningful probabilities to any of the steps to life except the first two (monomers to polymers p=1.0, formation of catalytic polymers p=1.0). For the replicating polymers to hypercycle transition, the probability may well be 1.0 if Kauffman is right about catalytic closure and his phase transition models, but this requires real chemistry and more detailed modelling to confirm. For the hypercycle->protobiont transition, the probability here is dependent on theoretical concepts still being developed, and is unknown.
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Tell me what you think about the article.