The Statement of Chemistry on the Origin of Life

American Thinker.com ^ | September 26, 2017 | James Clinton

[Kaslin]

In his August 1954, Scientific American article, "The Origin of Life," Nobel Prize winning Harvard Biologist George Wald stated,

"One only has to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."

What is "the magnitude of this task" that reasonably renders a natural origin of life "impossible?" Dr. Wald states,

"In the vast majority of processes in which we are interested the point of equilibrium lies far over toward the side of dissolution. That is to say, spontaneous dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis."

The processes of interest include building proteins, DNA, RNA, and lipids. Nature does not engage in the "processes" of building these life-essential molecules (synthesis); Nature, rather, dismantles them (dissolution), if they exist at all.

Why? Nature inexorably proceeds towards "equilibrium" (Chemical Equilibrium), the most stable state. For example, the most stable state for amino acids in Nature is individual amino acids, not proteins.

[JohnyBoy]

>Sorry, you are the only one playing semantic games by conflating 1800s “spontaneous generation” with current ideas on abiogenisis.
They are not the same in any way.

I just quoted you the history that showed that the concepts were the same, it’s the term that was dropped because it was thoroughly debunked by Pasture.

>A good many working scientists would beg to differ, and I agree with them.

And yet not a single reference to any of them shows up in wikipedia. Which means they haven’t produced any results of note, just more wild theories without evidence to support the Dogma.

[JohnyBoy]

>Beginning here: “spontaneous” cannot be said of any process taking **billions** of years.

Additionally taking a concept that doesn’t work in 1, 5, 10, 150+ years and saying well think it works when it happens over billions of years isn’t science. It’s just stretching conditions to make it impossible to test. IE, Dogma.

[editor-surveyor]

.
>> “And yet in fact there are a small number of mutations observed in every generation.” <<

Absolutely false!

You buy the lie.

>> “And because DNA mutations can be tracked back through ancestors to their originators, DNA analysis can tell us which regions or ethnicities we came from.” <<

Again,absolutely false.

Literally a consensus of error. The lion’s share of Earth’s population had its roots in Abraham, and were scattered by Salmanesser about 3 millennia ago.

(or are you a Bible denier?)
.

[editor-surveyor]

.
In this case its DogPa! (BroJoeK isn’t a “Ma” :o)
.

[UCANSEE2]

I asked if you’d ever seen negative gravity

AND the answer is YES. I posted a depiction of one example. Here is another one that is much simpler and easier to understand.

[21twelve]

Actually - that is a photo proving gravity. Without the Earth’s gravitational pull the space station would have flung out of orbit.

I knew a guy that built commercial, high-grade gravity meters. The Air Force had him investigate possible “anti-gravity” forces to account for long-range missiles being off-course. He thought that it was possible, but was never able to measure such anti-gravity forces. Or - that’s just what he told me! ;)

It would not surprise me if there are.

[UCANSEE2]

Actually - that is a photo proving gravity. Without the Earth’s gravitational pull the space station would have flung out of orbit.

And WHAT would cause it to be flung out of orbit ? What keeps it from crashing into the Earth ?

[CodeToad]

If we put the exact ratio of chemicals that make up basic life into a big pool and waited, we would never see life form.

[BroJoeK]

JohnnyBoy: "I just quoted you the history that showed that the concepts were the same, it’s the term that was dropped because it was thoroughly debunked by Pasture."

You quoted nothing which "showed that the concepts were the same", because they are not.
You are fantasizing if you think otherwise.

JohnnyBoy: "And yet not a single reference to any of them shows up in wikipedia."

You're kidding, right?

This is the link I recommended in post #100 above, on the subject of abiogenesis.
Check it out.
You'll find at the bottom, 327 references and a bibliography of 57 works, the oldest being Darwin from 1871 and the newest Ian Johnston from October, 2017.

[BroJoeK]

JohnnyBoy: "Additionally taking a concept that doesn’t work in 1, 5, 10, 150+ years and saying well think it works when it happens over billions of years isn’t science.
It’s just stretching conditions to make it impossible to test. IE, Dogma."

Here is an article on the "spontaneous generation" hypothesis which discusses its history and refutation.

"Crucial to this doctrine is the idea that life comes from non-life, with the conditions, and that no causal agent is needed (i.e. Parent).
Such hypothetical processes sometimes are referred to as abiogenesis, in which life routinely emerges from non-living matter on a time scale of anything from minutes to weeks, or perhaps a season or so.
An example would be the supposed seasonal generation of mice and other animals from the mud of the Nile.[8]
Such ideas have no operative principles in common with the modern hypothesis of abiogenesis, in which life emerged in the early ages of the planet, over a time span of at least millions of years, and subsequently diversified without evidence that there ever has been any subsequent repetition of the event."

Note the key words: "no operative principles in common".

[BroJoeK]

editor-surveyor: "Absolutely false!
You buy the lie."

And your scientific evidence for this is what, exactly?

editor-surveyor: "Again,absolutely false.
Literally a consensus of error."

And your scientific evidence for this is what, exactly?

editor-surveyor: "The lion’s share of Earth’s population had its roots in Abraham, and were scattered by Salmanesser about 3 millennia ago."

And your scientific evidence for that is what, exactly?

editor-surveyor: "(or are you a Bible denier?)"

I doubt if even you would claim the Bible was written as a scientific theory, but rather it's a translation of God's explanations to His people thousands of years ago.
As such, it tells His Truth versus mere scientific observations, hypotheses & theories.

[editor-surveyor]

.
You make a fool of yourself.

The responsibility to provide evidence is all yours. You made the ridiculous claims.
.

[BroJoeK]

CodeToad: "If we put the exact ratio of chemicals that make up basic life into a big pool and waited, we would never see life form."

Of course not, since in geological time scales of millions & billions of years, we'd be long dead before anything really interesting happened.

And understanding that all ideas regarding abiogenesis are in the realms of speculation and hypotheses, still, there's been some quite recent revisiting of Darwin's "warm little pond" musings.

"Life first emerged in 'warm little ponds' almost as old as the Earth itself - Charles Darwin's famous idea backed by new scientific study."

[CodeToad]

You wouldn’t get it if you waited a billion years.

Chemically speaking, things happen fast, not over billions of years.

[BroJoeK]

editor-surveyor: "The responsibility to provide evidence is all yours.
You made the ridiculous claims."

So you have no scientific evidence or theories to support your own claims, right?
You simply refuse to believe the science -- nothing wrong with that, no law says you have to, so long as you don't claim your own opinions are scientific, believe what you want.

And since your views are not based in science to begin with, there's no way for scientific evidence to refute them, is there?

Have a blessed day, sir or mam, as the case may be.

[editor-surveyor]

.
I stated the facts as presented in the only reliable source of information that exists on Earth: The Word of Yehova.

You on the other hand gave us pixie farts and other dreams of evil men.
.

[editor-surveyor]

.
BroJoeK has made it clear to all that he hasn’t the slightest idea what chemistry even is.
.

[BroJoeK]

CodeToad: "You wouldn’t get it if you waited a billion years.
Chemically speaking, things happen fast, not over billions of years."

As Miller-Urey demonstrated in 1954.
But chemical processes leading to life would surely require millions of steps and each could only happen under ideal conditions for that step.
If such ideal conditions were at one end of the Earth for step 12,397 and at the other end for step 12,398 then we might suppose some considerable time elapse between those steps, right?

[CodeToad]

Go ahead and map that out mathematically and let’s see if 4 billions year has been long enough.

[CodeToad]

“BroJoeK has made it clear to all that he hasn’t the slightest idea what chemistry even is.”

Much less mathematics. Childishly believes 4 billion years is a such a long time that all kind of extremely unlikely miracles can occur in such a short time span.