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Scientists Create RNA From Primordial Soup
Kristina at Science News writes "The RNA world hypothesis proposed 40 years ago suggested that life on Earth started not with DNA but with RNA. Now a team of scientists bolsters this hypothesis, having assembled RNA in the lab from a mixture that resembles what was likely the primordial soup. 'Until now,' Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure out the chemical reactions that created the earliest RNA molecules.' The new work started the RNA assembly chemistry from a different angle than what earlier work had tried."
Abiogenesis.... Take that ID-iots!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
A wizard did it.
That they accidentally got RNA and thought they created it themselves? Did you read the article?
âoeBut while this is a step forward, itâ(TM)s not the whole picture,â Ferris points out. âoeItâ(TM)s not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. Itâ(TM)s a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didnâ(TM)t happen in the ancient world.â
Sutherland and his team can so far make RNA molecules with two different bases, and there are still another two bases to figure out.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
they found a reaction pathway - that does not prove it happened that way - I too thought the article title indicated spontaneous generation of RNA from primordial soup.
... and holy Unicode-less Slashdot, Batman. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Demonstrating that another link in the evolutionary chain can happen without conscious intervention (spontaneously and mechanically) does not demonstrate the non-existence of an intelligent designer.
It, at best, removes a point that was previously used to defend ID.
But, logically, the inability to prove something does not constitute a disproof (that would be the fallacy of Argumentum ad Ignorantium).
Disclaimer: I am not an ID proponent. I am just a logician.
a mixture that resembles what was likely the primordial soup.
Deja vu: I just had primordial soup for lunch.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Anyone that only scans the synopsis is going to get the wrong idea. Read the article...it's more than likely that this never occurred in nature. Since when do organisms add material and cleanse and add and cleanse? Who threw the sugar in the first primordial soup? Where would RNA get it's instructions? There are too many holes... this isn't a breakthrough in science, It's an episode of "The Frugal Gourmet"
This is the reaction sequence that's being proposed here: link.
Previously, the sticking point was that there was no logical way for the sugar (ribose) to spontaneously attach to the base. Organisms use enzymes to transfer a ribose phosphate group to a base, but of course, in the time before enzymes could be coded for, that wouldn't be possible. This sequence neatly sidesteps that, and also provides a more logical reason for phosphate to be involved; it is the reagent that attacks that tricyclic pyrimidosugar, breaking the bond to form ribocytidine phosphate.
Coincidentally, UV light deaminates cytosine to form uracil, which is where that second base comes from. This is why DNA uses thymine instead of uracil, by the way- as the archival storage medium for our genetic information, it would be unwise to have one base easily interconvert into another. The shorter expected lifetime of RNA means the interconversion is not a concern, though.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
"Sutherland says [...] 'The key turned out to be the order that the ingredients are added and the way you put them together -- like making a soufflé.'"
How much clearer does it need to be made to you amoral materialists that cooking dinner needs *a Chef*?
The only thing I regret is that Sutherland compared God's Work to making a "soufflé". Couldn't he have used a good Christian American recipe?
Like omelette!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
d) God is actually a woman. Powerful, but insecure, and she needs you to show her how much you love her all the time. If you don't, she'll get depressed and eat her weight in mint-chocolate chip ice cream, in which case she'll end up omnipresent in more ways than one.
'Likes to play mind games' was option c)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is generally double stranded (classic double helix) and is more robust than RNA (ribonucleic acid) which is generally single stranded. Both use a base 4 code of triplets of certain additions to contain information (normally denoted C,G,A and T). However, RNA has a slightly different set of bases (having uracil in the place of thymine so U instead of T). Almost all life on earth uses DNA to store information in its long-term form and makes RNA when it needs to make proteins. This is a process known as transcription http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_(genetics).
The primary reason why this discovery is a big deal is that there is a hypothesis that all life started out as using RNA and only later evolved to use DNA. This is known as the RNA world hypothesis- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis This is a very popular idea in abiogenesis research. There are number of avenues of evidence for thinking this: Essentially, the major problem with a DNA first model of abiogenesis is that DNA cannot normally reproduce itself without proteins. Moreover, DNA cannot produce proteins without the aid of RNA. However, properly chosen RNA strands can reproduce themselves without protein assistance. Moreover, RNA can directly mediate the synthesis of proteins. So if one can find a procedure that can plausibly produced RNA then one can handle most of the problems of abiogenesis in one fell swoop.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
-Epicurus, 300 BCE
The refrain from fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim and Jew alike, is because he is God, and he said so, according to this really old book. Which is usually the inerrant word of God - they just can't agree on which version is the "perfect" word. Once you try to engage someone who firmly believes that they know what God thinks, there's no use in trying to apply logic.
One of my favorite David Cross bits is where he's asking out loud for the name of the television show where there's this guy on stage, and everyone in the television audience believes he can talk to the dead. The crowd in front of David keeps shouting out "Crossing Over!"
And then David says, "Oh no, it was church, it was church."
You just made three unsupported and ridiculous assertions as if they were a logical argument. Nice hat trick.
Religion does not need to rely on faith. Buddhism certainly doesn't, but I know some consider that a philosophy, not a religion. Still, it is listed as a major world religion, and it requires no one to take anything on faith.
Predestination and free will are both pointless human speculations unsupported by any human experiences, and if free will were real, it would be a curse, not a gift, especially considering your God's planned punishments for going against arbitrary rules that you have no way of knowing came from Him.
If God were to be in residence and free will were real, God's presence would not diminish free will. So what? At most, nobody would choose to sin anymore. I don't choose to froom, either, and my not being able to choose to froom does not diminish any free will I may have.
But people could still choose to sin knowing God existed, I know I would, just to register my disapproval of God's arbitrary and unjust actions. Infinite punishment for finite transgressions, my ass. Fuck you, God, I'm going out to fuck a guy JUST TO PISS YOU OFF, YOU SHIT! I'm not even gay, I'll probably hate it, but I'm going to do it just because you said you'd torture me forever if I did. I don't negotiate with terrorists.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Life is complex and it works well. It's not proof, it's evidence. The laws of physics yield a consistent universe. It's not proof, it's evidence.
Both of these things are only evidence of themselves. Nothing more. You cannot logically extrapolate these things into anything more than they are without direct evidence of something more. No matter how much evidence the universe gives of its own existence, it does not point to anything beyond that, be it God or invisible unicorns or Flying Spaghetti Monsters, sauce be upon him, or anything else. The current body of evidence points only to its own existence.
If you want to posit the existence of God, based on the evidence provided by the universe, then you need direct evidence of God (well, you also need a clear, falsifiable definition of God). Otherwise, Occam's Razor gives us the more likely conclusion. Given the same body of evidence, the simpler explanation tends to be the correct explanation, unless more evidence appears to show otherwise.
In this case, the body of evidence: The universe.
- H0.) The universe just exists.
- H1.) The universe exists because God created it. God just exists.
Given the same body of evidence, H0 is the more likely explanation, and there is no REASON to assume H1 without further evidence.
While you cannot prove a negative, in science, lack of evidence for H1 is provisional evidence for H0. Also, any scientist knows that you can NEVER prove anything based on observation. You can only disprove it OR decrease the likelihood of its falseness.
NB: Most of the "you" in this post is the general "you" not a specific "you" to the parent post.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Indeed; nothing can.
Nor indeed is there any requirement or reason to "demonstrate the non-existence of X," where there is no evidence for the putative existence of X.
On a side not, this discovery doesn't demonstrate the non-existence of the tooth fairy either.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Let's apply that logic to the first sighting of sperm fertilizing an egg.
1. Laboratory conditions. Check.
2. "The new findings suggest a possible method for traits to be passed from both mother and father to child..." Check.
3. Proof that babies come from sex. Not a chance.
4. Someone with a time machine that can verify that my mother would degrade herself like that? Nope.
Fertilization still remains philosophical at best, NOT science.
The fact that we have shown that it can happen tends to support the hypothesis that it did happen, because we know that RNA is a part of all living things on Earth and we know that it had to come from somewhere.
Unless you have a better explanation, one that fits into a naturalistic framework as that is the framework within which science exists.
Your brain is not a computer.
Keep in mind that the people you're arguing with are the same people who, despite countless examples that sex can lead to pregnancy, and zero examples of virgins getting pregnant, still believe Mary was a virgin.
It's quite clear that these are not people who believe in evidence supporting hypotheses.
The convention is to write in the 5' to 3' direction and usually the sense strand. Unless I'm getting things backwards again (and I often am, can't keep left and right straight either) 3-TAC-5 in the antisense strand is what is actually used to copy the mRNA transcript, which is 5-AUG-3, the same as the sense strand 5-ATG-3. The t-RNA has UAC which corresponds to it.
So, unless I'm once again confused, that would be two types of backward.
Anyway, there is no message in any frame, nor on the complementary strand.
http://www.expasy.ch/tools/dna.html
5'3' Frame 1
EYIAH-YIET
5'3' Frame 2
NTSHISILR
5'3' Frame 3
IHRTLVY-D
3'5' Frame 1
SLNILMCDVF
3'5' Frame 2
VSIY-CAMY
3'5' Frame 3
SQYTNVRCI
and reversing the sequence, in case it was written 3-5 also had nothing
TCA GAG TTA TAT GAT TAC ACG CTA CAT AAG
5'3' Frame 1
SELYDYTLHK
5'3' Frame 2
QSYMITRYI
5'3' Frame 3
RVI-LHAT-
3'5' Frame 1
LM-RVII-L-
3'5' Frame 2
LCSV-SYNS
3'5' Frame 3
YVACNHITL
I also did a quick blast search of the human genome and came up with no hits. I started trying to set the parameters to allow for mismatches (I don't use it all that often) when I realized that I'm probably completely missing the joke.
Keep in mind that the people you're arguing with are the same people who, despite countless examples that sex can lead to pregnancy, and zero examples of virgins getting pregnant, still believe Mary was a virgin.
It's quite clear that these are not people who believe in evidence supporting hypotheses.
Actually, there have been examples of virgins getting pregnant, but not without exposure to sperm.
</nitpick>
Ignore this signature. By order.
You're conflating an event with a process. The process of abiogenesis (generating life from non-living matter) is a perfectly valid scientific field, of which this experiment was a part.
The event(s) in the past that are hypothesised to be the initiation of life on the planet are a related, but ultimately independent claim that despite your objection can also be investigated scientifically. Learning about the processes of generating life from non living matter are simply a necessary precursor to investigating the actual event of the origin of life on the earth.
You don't need a time machine to scientifically establish past events. You simply need to be able to investigate the evidence that exists today. Applying your rationale to your own beliefs about the origin of life: presumably you have none since you don't have a time machine to travel back and see it for yourself. Presumably you believe that the claims of creationists are inherently empty, since they don't have a time machine to travel back and view the garden of eden for themselves.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons