Posted on 02/03/2006 10:23:55 PM PST by neverdem
For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components but, rather, what pathway might have been followed.
—National Academy of Sciences (1996)
It is 1828, a year that encompassed the death of Shaka, the Zulu king, the passage in the United States of the Tariff of Abominations, and the battle of Las Piedras in South America. It is, as well, the year in which the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler announced the synthesis of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia.
Discovered by H.M. Roulle in 1773, urea is the chief constituent of urine. Until 1828, chemists had assumed that urea could be produced only by a living organism. Wöhler provided the most convincing refutation imaginable of this thesis. His synthesis of urea was noteworthy, he observed with some understatement, because “it furnishes an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal substance, from inorganic materials.”
Wöhler’s work initiated a revolution in chemistry; but it also initiated a revolution in thought. To the extent that living systems are chemical in their nature, it became possible to imagine that they might be chemical in their origin; and if chemical in their origin, then plainly physical in their nature, and hence a part of the universe that can be explained in terms of “the model for what science should be.”*
In a letter written to his friend, Sir Joseph Hooker, several decades after Wöhler’s announcement, Charles Darwin allowed himself to speculate. Invoking “a warm little pond” bubbling up in the dim inaccessible past, Darwin imagined that given “ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present,” the spontaneous generation of a “protein compound” might follow, with this compound...
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Heck, without those, creationists wouldn't have very much to post....
Urea to diarrhea placemark
Glycine is achiral, the rest are L-amino acids, although D-amino acids do exist in nature.
My only point in the earlier post was that someone mentioned that Berlinski could have clicked on one of Ichneumon's posts.
He couldn't do that, unless he actually read Free Republic.
Whether or not he knows, or should be expected to know, the information contained within Ichneumon's earlier post is another matter. And if RWP is correct, Berlinski doesn't know what on Earth he's talking about, concerning recent developments in the chemistry of abiogenesis.
He doesn't know, he doesn't point out that he doesn't know, and commits the additional error of assuming his threshold of ignorance is the same as everyone else's--and we have a number of posters pointing out exactly at which point he drives into a ditch.
That's good for the intellectual state of readers of this thread. (I have been given to understand that other famous personages, such as "The Great One" Mark Levin, and possibly Ann Coulter, read Free Republic.)
But is Berlinski himself gonna read it on this thread?
Cheers!
Umm, time out.
Can you photonically excite the electrons within a covalent bond to a higher energy level (n)? Thereby changing the Born-Oppenheimer surface on which the nuclei are travelling?
...and thereby change the reactivity of the molecule?
Cheers!
Right, glycine is achiral. There's only one D amino acid used in bacteria, I think(CRS). The rest are all converted to D after transcription.
Yikes, say it ain't so, Joe!
I hold in my hand a bottle of L-Arginine which I purchased upon the written recommendation of the late Dr. Atkins (in one of his Atkins Diet books, as an aid to more restful sleep.
You mean I done been flim-flammed on this purchase? :-)
Cheers!
Cheers!
This is indeed the problem. FR is not a primary source of abiogenesis information. It is not even secondary. People who have done important research in the field do not publish here as the primary means of announcing their findings to the world.
Thus, asking whether Berlinksi reads the threads here is something close to irrelevant if not a strawman. The question is whether Berlinksi has availed himself of the public research of the last decade or so in abiogenesis. My particular answer based on long observation of the creation/ID publishing genre is "Yes, but only to get what he considers the 'good stuff' and leaving everything else."
Holy Warrior Recta (Latin plural of the singular rectum--look it up) are allowed to do that. It's for a good cause and all that. Traditional scholarship equates it with lying. When you say the preponderance of evidence is really A, but it's really B, you're a liar if you selectively filtered all the non-A because it doesn't work for your agenda.
glycine is achiral. In any case, there is racemization to contend with.
I said anyone could do that, meaning "anyone here." Someone writing something that purports to be a review of where we are in abiogenesis research should not need to do that, of course.
The problem is that Berlinski has assumed the mantle of someone qualified to review where we are, but he would appear not to know anything about the evidence inconvenient to the agenda of the un-Discovery Institute of which he is a fellow.
I should have read ahead. But I did mention racemization.
By that bold claim the NAS engaged in poor science at best read, and propaganda at worst read.
D-alanine and D-glutamic acid are both important components in the peptidoglycan of bacteria.
ping to 94. (Are you a water-affine barrister btw? So your handle might suggest from "voir dire", or "see to say".)
Or, anyone can scroll down a bit in this Ichneumon post and see scientific evidence supporting a reducing Archaean atmosphere. Why does Berlinski seem unaware of this?
I meant--literally--that Berlinski was unlikely to have scrolled down a bit in the Ichneumon post.
As you so eloquently pointed out, the leading researchers in the field do not use Free Republic as a means of propagating their research. That was precisely the point I was making.
Somewhere on these threads, there must be a few dials or knobs marked Sarcasm or Dry Humor.
My only question is whether Berlinski is in fact merely *ignorant* of recent developments--see my remark about his assuming the threshold of his ignorance, and how he thinks it is the same as everyone else's.
Cheers!
Yes, in a single bond. There is no overlap over the whole chiral protein molecule, so there can be no change of n for the molecule. Single bonds are not involved in optical rotation, other than being a component of the whole system of bonds. Only vib and rot states can be changed for the molecule. Even in that case, single bonds amout to the bulk of the targets.
The rotation of polarized light is a dielectric response. As the frequency of the light is very close to a vib absorption peak, involving the major dielectric atomic, or molecular components, the interaction becomes more pronounced.
Cheers!
They are enzymatically converted from L, post translation.
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