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Old Materials Resurface For "Prebiotic Soup"
AliasMarlowe writes "Stanley Miller performed the famous experiments in the 1950s showing that amino acids and other building blocks for biomolecules could be produced by passing lightning through a mix of simple hydrocarbons, water vapor, and ammonia (thought at the time to approximate the Earth's early atmosphere). Other experiments approximated the environment around volcanic eruptions, but those results were not published. Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments, in labelled vials. Analysis of this material indicates that the conditions around volcanic eruptions (still thought to be representative of such events in the early Earth) resulted in a higher yield of amino acids than the simple lightning experiments, and resulted in a greater variety of amino acids." Pharyngula has a discussion of the Science paper, including a graph of the amino acids produced.
Just add volcano.
We have since discovered that complex organic molecules form even in space.
(I am not a molecular biologist), but can someone explain if there we could expect some changes to the composition over 60 years? Are some chemicals produced going to break down in that time?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Great, just add more fuel to the Scientology fire.
Here's an interesting philosophical question. After the first autocatalytic sets and simple replicators, but before the first cell walls, was the entire Earth a single organism?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And I am considered a single organism.
It sounds like it would be interesting to check the amino acids and genome of the life that exists surrounding the undersea vents. Since our oceans are no longer "prebiotic soup", there probably won't be anything truly remarkable (previously unknown amino acids in the DNA for example), but if there is anything, that would be an incredible breakthrough.
We are the 198 proof..
My tutor at university used to get us to produce reports on old papers from the really early days of compsci, the 50's and 60's.
What amazed me was how many great ideas were put forward which just couldn't have been implemented successfully at the time, and how many have turned up again many years later as "new" ideas.
There are many ideas that were invented decades ago, but people have just forgotten about.
It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.
Paul Leader
Amazing how much of the stuff in high school biology texts turns out to be not-quite-as-advertised.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
You know what else gives a higher yield of amino acids? 1 egg, 1 sperm, and 9 months.
I would say this is another potential blow to young-Earth creationists, but I think most of them aren't going to give this particular experiment much credit. It's unfortunate that we can't just look at the results of scientific experiments at face value without requiring a religious interpretation tacked on to the end. We'd all get along much better that way. Theists could do generally accepted scientific study without getting discredited for their beliefs. On the other hand, enough science already goes on with predetermined goals in mind, so maybe it's a moot point.
Disclaimer: I am a creationist, although not a young-Earth creationist, and I don't disagree with most of the tenets of evolution. I won't engage in debate over the merits of evolutionist vs. creationist perspectives, because there's little to no meaningful debate to be had. At this point, both sides of the debate are taking whatever evidence comes up and claiming it supports their perspective.
In other words, don't expect me to argue over the existence of God in this thread. Interesting findings, though!
It's unfortunate that we can't just look at the results of scientific experiments at face value without requiring a religious interpretation tacked on to the end
Why not? That's what scientists do. It's almost everyone else who has that problem.
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Well virtually every cubic centimeter on the planet already contains some form of life already. Chances are a random collection of amino acids, phosphates, and maybe even a base sugar or two that could have eventually possibly evolved into a totally new life form before life existed will actually just get swallowed up by a passing bacterium or amoeba today.
From TFA:
Yes, I know that Miller's reducing atmosphere is no longer considered to be an accurate representation of the ancient earth's atmosphere
This is true; in fact, had Miller used an accurate representation of ancient earth's atmosphere, the result would have been formaldehyde and cyanide - the very antithesis of life. It is interesting, though, (and I'm not trying to troll, or take sides on anything), but one thing the Miller experiment illustrated was that life could be intelligently planned and synthesized. Wouldn't that seem to support modern day ID more so than evolution?
Yes, the original pre-biotic soup of life likely contained a bunch of RNA/DNA pre-cursor nucleotides as well as amino acids, sugars and who knows what else. I'm sure many different self-replicating molecules competed for these pre-cursors but according to the RNA-World hypothesis, RNA was able to out-compete other strategies (RNA it turns out does a halfway decent job of storing genetic information as well as catalyzing reactions). The theory goes that RNA eventually became the dominate self-replicating molecule and at some point these RNA molecules shifted the responsibility of storing genetic data to DNA (which is more stable and less prone to replication errors) and shifted enzymatic activity to proteins. I find this hypothesis fairly elegant as this kind of evolution explains RNA's current function in modern cells - as an intermediary between DNA and proteins. Also, that ribosomes still use RNA (rRNA) for enzymatic assembly of proteins with the help of tRNA to fetch the amino acids and mRNA to carry the genetic information from the DNA to the ribosomes. RNA's central role in the creation of proteins seems to imply it had the initial role of genetic storage and enzymes before it outsourced it to DNA and proteins.
I am sure there are plenty of instances since modern cells became prevalent of abiotic formation of complex molecules but they serve as nothing but a snack for modern bacteria.
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments
How did he discover the materials after his death?
ever heard of the law of extremely large numbers?
if probability is 1 in 10^23 and there are 10^26 trials then you should, statistically speaking, have approximately 10^3 occurances
people also seem to think the real world is stuck to doing serial "trials" when in reality it is massively parallel.
PS: random assembly can lead to self replicating molecules in a soup containing the appropriate precusors, it's been replicated i just don't have a link ATM
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
I've never understood why many people can't accept the co-existence of science and religion. They do not have to be mutually exclusive, it's just the extremists on both sides which create the problem.
...
Take Christianity and The Big Bang theroy. They work out just fine, so long as the Christian can accept that the Bible may not be a 100% accurate portrayal of how God did it. And the science side doesn't get up in arms with the idea that god wrote the laws of the universe. You know, maybe he dumbed it down a bit so that his bronze age audience could understand it.
My usual view of it is about:
God: In the beginning there was nothing, not time, not space, truly absolutely nothing.
Well, the quiet was nice, but it got boring fast. So, I figured I would write up the basic laws to run a universe, kick start it and see what that got me.
Abraham: Nothing, Universal Laws, kick start, got it. But what do you mean by "no time", how can you have no time?
God: Just go with me on that one, you'll figure it out later.
Abraham:OK.
God:So, the Universe exploded into existence, as it expanded a high energy plasma began to condense down into quarks, anti-quarks and a whole host of other sub-atomic particles. And it was truly chaos. Particles and their anti-particles were colliding and mutually an... Yes, what it is Abraham, why are you raising your hand, do you need to pee?
Abraham: Um, I think you lost me at about "Plasma", and I know what a "cork" is, but what's and "anti-cork", it is some kind of spout?
God: Oh right, a few thousands years early on those, aren't I? Um, how are you with Calculus?
Abraham: Calcu-what?
God: Non-euclidean algebra?
Abraham:
God: Right, fuck it. New clay tablet. In the beginning I said, "Let there be light!" and there was, and it was good. Still with me?
You know, maybe the Bible/Koran/Torah aren't really literal versions of what happened. Maybe they are just metaphors which worked for early man, and God hasn't bothered to update them.
And no matter how fun it is to pick on religious folk, there is really no harm in them believing that there is an invisible sky wizard behind everything. As long as they aren't forcing that belief on others. Or trying to harm others who disagree with them.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Why would it be a blow to anyone especially the loony creationists? This experiment, looking at it a few years later, didn't prove anything but that scientist also can be caught in hypes. Even 60 years later after these 'ideal' environments were defined and many more experiments with it, nothing more but amino acids have been created in a lab. To go from an amino acid to a single living cell is a big jump. A lot of those amino acids have to line up perfectly into things called RNA and DNA and then they have to all come together and somehow be jolted to life and THEN you have a single cell. Then that single cell has to be strong enough and survive long enough in that environment (whether it be lightning or volcanoes which are both very violent and tend to destroy stuff) it was created in and then it has to somehow figure out how to reproduce and in all that time, these 'ideal' environments have to calm down to a certain level so multi-celled organisms can survive.
This hypothesis has very little credibility now in the 'real' scientific world. It might still be in high school and college textbooks and some of you armchair scientists might know of them but the probability of it actually happening that way is so very low that even hardcore (read: religionist) evolutionists just look at it and say 'meh, let's look at something else'.
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The distinction between life and non-life is quite big, so ...
This is a false premise. While there is a noticeable gap between things that are definitely alive and things that definitely aren't, there are intermediate forms which we have a harder time classifying (e.g. viruses). Rather than a single "big and spontaneous" event, consider that non-living structures can gradually transition through various levels of semi-life before eventually giving way to something we would clearly recognize as a living organism.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Um, say what? 'Which' particular hypothesis has very little credibility? Abiogenesis? Just because it's a difficult field of study doesn't mean it is either uninteresting, unfunded or un-anything. For your edification and enjoyment a few crackpot lectures.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
HIV is actually a very bad example. A majority of HIV researchers now agree that HIV is a Stochastic mutator - that is, it does genuinely random mutation, in this case between at least 4 subtypes (This theory isn't accepted universally among HIV researchers yet, but it seems to be surviving any challenges quite well, and the people who are becoming supporters are well established researchers, solid main-stream PhD Biologists and even the Nobel winners in the field.).
For a Stochastic Mutator, the chance for type A to 'evolve' into type B stays the same as the chance for type B to 'evolve' back into type A, and so on, so there is no net evolutionary direction to this process (hence the word stochastic). A stochastic mutator may also mutate in non-stochastic ways, indeed the Theory of Evolution says it must, just as every other species does. Figuring out HIV's actual evolutionary mutation rate, and what part of the total rate is subject to selection pressure, takes separating this stochastic part from the total data.
Your use of "20% from the original strain" is meaningless. 20% in how many years just might be a meaningful number, but what the hell does 20% standing by itself mean? Even better, talk about the mutation rates per individual offspring and per generation, instead of per fixed time. If you can't talk meaningfully about these, then you have nothing to contribute.
Let's see - you don't have the actual facts, just your made up ones, and you descended to calling lots of names. Yep, he's the religious fanatic and you're the rational individual. You've convinced me.
Who is John Cabal?
> people also seem to think the real world is stuck to doing serial "trials" when in reality it is massively parallel.
But conversely, many people also to fail to realise that the parallelism of the physical world is tiny and insignificant compared to the combinatorial explosion that comes about when you consider the number of ways to combine atoms into molecules. Unfortunately, we don't really have much of a handle on what proportion of the space of possible molecule sets is occupied by autocatalytic ones. If it's 1 in 10^100, say, that a universe with 10^80 particles starts looking like a very small place.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
b0ttle said: I'd really like to know more about your creational beliefs, could you explain it in more details?
Ok, for what it's worth, as one who believes that Creationism better explains life than Evolutionism, I'll give it a whirl.
First, I'll lay some groundwork concerning my conclusion. One's belief in Creationism or Evolutionism is determined by how a person believes concerning the origin of matter: either matter has always existed and always been in motion (as Robert Ingersoll posits) or God has always existed, created matter, and set it in motion.
The existence of God is a binary choice: God exists or God does not exist. One of these statements is true and one is false. They cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. It must be one or the other, just as an electrical switch is on or off: either the switch is on or it is off.
So which is it? It must be one or the other. Here is basically the two versions:
Version 1 There is no God. Hydrogen (and all matter for that matter) has always existed. These particles of matter over unfathomable lengths of time moved themselves together, perhaps by magnetism or molecular attraction to form water, proteins, iron, and all manner of molecules which, again over long periods of time, combined to form comets, planets, suns, and eventually a living organism. Over time the information blueprint of this organism (DNA) mutated forming different but similar organisms which changed even further over time. Eventually, blind organisms derived the ability to see, mindless creatures derived the ability to evaluate conditions and make use of what it has seen, and deaf creatures derived the ability to hear. Plants, themselves blind, deaf, and mindless, who have no concept of air currents, structural design, or gravity, formed, by blind, mindless processes aerodynamic seedlings which could disperse in the breeze. Spiders with silk glands (another chance mutation) appeared from the pool of organisms forming and taught themselves to spin webs and somehow imparted this information into its DNA. After so many millions of years of these blueprint changes, organisms becoming more and more complex, these changes accumulated to form a human being, forming at the same time both male and female versions that could come together and produce offspring.
Version 2 God has always existed, has no beginning or ending. This God created all matter, and from this matter God created the universe, setting the magnitude of suns and the spinning of planets. God also created all living things within a short period of time from each other, including humans; both male and female God created them.
Others more intelligent and expressive than myself have put it better than I but this is basically what it comes down to. People have argued for centuries over which is the correct version. I do not pretend to resolve such disputes here other than portray the two options available. Whichever version you choose is a matter of faith because no human has any idea where matter came from. There are only guesses and a consensus of plausible possibilities.
So, is it Creation or Evolution? For me, the evidence for Creation is all around: the earth, the elements, trees, the sun --all of these entities did not pop out of nowhere, hence, they were created.
Rocks do not move themselves. Mindless matter does not accumulate into the fantastic designs with purpose such as a reproductve system or the human mind. Since it is not plausible that random, mindless, chance processes or accidents could result in life as we see today then the only other option is God.
Evolution posits that all life started from a common ancestor (this ancestor arising via abiogenesis) and "evolved" over time via mutations and Natural Selection to the diverse species we see today. This theory cannot be proven nor can it be disproven. It is a possible explanation, just as it is possible a cosmic baboon farted life into existence, and many scientist attempt to push round pegs into square holes to try and make the evidence fit with the assumption that the theory is true, but it is not a plausible theory given belief in God.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
That people still believe in it or study it doesn't mean it's not on shaky grounds. There is still ample study being funded that tries to defy both standard and quantum physics (creation of energy out of nothing) or that tries to defy science (some states in the US try to tell the world was created in literally 7 days and the earth (and everything else) is only 8000 years old). Abiogenesis was believed in by Greeks but Pasteur eventually found out that nothing comes out of nothing.
The biggest problem with abiogenesis as is proposed by the Miller experiment is that they don't take into account that amino acids -> structured rna -> protocell would take much longer than the environment would have been around and even if it was, the environment would've killed off the cells as soon as they were created (the amount of oxygen needed alone would burn those things right up). Chemistry, geology and astronomy tells us that the amount of time such excellent conditions existed on earth would've been fairly short (the necessary elements in the atmosphere would've decayed or at least have reacted by then according to chemists, geologists tell us the environment itself would've changed a lot between then and astronomy tells us that it would've been all blown away by meteor strikes (which were common in those time periods).
I'm not saying it's a dead science or that it's all wrong, just that those type of environments in the big picture would've meant nothing.
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Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments, in labelled vials.
So the former student died, was placed in labeled vials and then made this discovery? That is simply astounding.
I can't understand one can be an intelligent being and believe in $Deity. The quick answer is: in light of religion, independant thought dies.
On a side-note, I can't think of a reason why you would want to conjure up a 'being' to create our universe. Where did the being come from? What created that being? If that being could exist forever out of nothing, then why not the universe by and of itself?
You could do worse than to read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins for a more thorough argumentation, if you can spare the time. Be warned, it isn't a very 'nice' book by most standards, but is sincere, rather complete and gives theists and deists a view from the other side of the isle. A view that they'll likely (hopefully?) never forget.
People 'need' religion like they need being set on fire.
queue the theist burning me to a crisp.
(It's well worth it, too.)
Karma? What's that again?
"Intolerant fundies are simply a very vocal minority."
Unfortunately you're not even on my level... it would take years of reading for you to catch up unfortunately, when I mean "uninformed" I mean lacking in insight into humanity and human nature and it's inherent defectiveness. It's not merely intolerant fundies, go look at the ravings of mr scot here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/
These people still believe and spread things that are not true and fuckup their kids lives with their rather primitive morality, not only that most people in your red state wouldn't even qualify as christian because that is how bad they are at thinking and reading the bible (if they do at all), when it comes to things that psychologically comfort them which they refuse to let go of. They're mostly secular people with a crazy religious bent who can't let go of the blanket of religion that keeps them warm at night.
It still doesn't absolve them of the fact that they are a bunch of liars who harm the world by their lies and inflict their primtivism on others and most importantly - their children. Tolerance is not a virtue here, it is a vice that has come out of the enlightenment view of reason and humanity, human beings are not nice creatures. They are primitive and feral to the bone. Millons of years and we still have war and poverty ffs. All men are primitive and I'll be glad once we start moving away from man 1.0, human beings (that is v1.0) are a failed race, of this I am certain. I don't buy the myth that people are good people, if they were good they would restrain their feral impulses and we wouldn't live in capitalist society where we have people eat $10,000 dinners and some man has to live on the street homeless, the fact that we have homeless people at all proves that mankind is not very nice or capable of controlling itself as a species. That fact alone speaks volumes of how not good we are because most people are a bunch of selfish hyper individualistic animals.
People are naturally prejudice as we know, but it signals a deeper more disturbing message about humans being the descendents of animals -- i.e. we are more wild animal then humane. Considering we allow people to have billions of dollars while some disabled man or woman may suicide over not being able to pay the bills. This shows us just how messed up human beings really are and how ignorant / apathetic they are in reality despite all the flashy words, inspiring messages and whatnot. And also how fearful they are of commiting to building relationships with others they perceive as "the other" even when they haven't done anything wrong.
People who believe illusions and lies are the problem in this world, people who will make dumb ass decisions that keep the world mired in confusion and the ethical backwardness it is in must be called on it. The reason teh world is so fucked up is because we allow the buck to pass, the war in iraq could have been shortened if all americans got up and caused the biggest shitstorm teh world has ever seen but most are apathetic plebes who couldn't give a rats ass for a bunch of what they might consider "brown people" in another country.
The truth is humans suck so lets not sugarcoat it ok? Millions of years, we're still at war with one another, some one or all human beings have something desperately wrong with them that needs to be fixed.