Life Originally Arose via. Abiogenesis

( pro's closing argument can be found in comment #7) "You absolutely need a code" Jacques Monod My thanks to pro for a spirited debate on a crucial topic. By prior agreement, I will not be addressing pro's final round. There is no kind way to put this: we see on display in pro's rebuttal round a toxic blend of blind faith mixed with misinformation and demonstrable falsehood. I cannot possibly address everything, so I have selected a few examples. I use the abbreviation, "P:" to denote "pro said." P: "there is no reason to expect that the existing codon mechanism is irreducible" Let us analyze the audacity of this claim: *there is not a shred of evidence that doublet or singlet codons have ever existed. *by pro's own admission, a doublet codon would dramatically reduce the pool of existing amino acids by 25% (from 20 to 15 with one necessary stop codon). *allowing for maximum AA retention requires the complete elimination of redundancy. T the more we learn, the more critical and prominent the role of redundancy becomes[15,16]. *Given that most proteins require AA chains of several hundred, consider the catastrophic effect on the number of proteins that would be lost by a doublet codon system. By way of analogy, remove any 6 letters from the english alphabet and consider how many paragraphs would be lost. *all living systems employ the standard triplet codon, nothing less. *The laws of information theory make it absolute that any pre-existing code has to have been at least as complex as the current code [17]. Codes are not and cannot be built bottom up. Here and elsewhere, pro relies on a prebiotic natural selection, but NS presupposes self replication systems. Von Neumann has shown that any system capable of self replication would require subsystems functionally equivalent to the processing systems of extant cells [18]. Prior to function, there is nothing to select. As Dobzhansky noted, 'Prebiotic NS is a contradiction in terms" P: "I don't know how Con can make the claim "AAs in protein chains must be bound by peptide bonds, but other bonds are every bit as likely." Since peptide bonds (-CONH-) are essentially the only covalent bonds that can form between amines & carboxylic acids at ambient conditions." Pro is confused here. He is really talking about amide bonds. Peptide bonds are a kind of amide bond, but they are not the only kind. However, they are the only biologically relevant kind. All kinds of amide bonds - peptide and non-peptide - are equally possible. My point stands. P: " a cursory search of one of the most highly conserved proteins ubiquitous in life, the cytochrome C protein is 100 AA long, and has a massive ~40 amino acid variation (40%)" Pro wants us to be impressed by 40%, but this figure can only be the product of either pure ignorance or pure deceit. With 20 AAs possible at each of 100 positions, allowing for 40 substitutions means that only 1 in 10^128 (rounded down) sequences will result in cytochrome C! There's still plenty of room for all the functional chains an organism could want and Yockey's functional chain estimate of 1 in 10^90 remains safe. Ironically, Yockey derived his estimate directly from his studies of cytochrome C![3] P: "Con makes numerous claims about amino acids. First we can rule most of these irrelevant as they are evolutionary issues" Obviously false. Amino acids are indispensable to life. P: " Moreover homochirality has a thermodynamic drive to arise in systems" homochirality in natural processes remains purely hypothetical. P: " We are not limited to "chance". But pro offers chains of random polymers as a starting point. This does indeed return him to a "chance" search! P: "Con"s entire set of arguments here is based on the "prosecutor"s fallacy" Noting that highly improbable events happen all the time, pro offers 3 examples: a SS#, a phone #, and me (resulting from pregnancy), he adds: However nobody makes the claim your social security number, or Joepalscak"s existence is anything but the result of chance, simply because we are not "privileging the result". Note that in all three of his examples, the context demands an inevitable result. So why do we "privilege" the result of a particular AA chain? It is true that sheer complexity by itself does not demand privilege, but specified complexity does[19]! Consider pro's telephone # analogy. Most telephone numbers are randomly assigned. However, businesses will typically request and receive a deliberately customized number. I am a caterer. If my phone number were C-A-T-E-R-E-R-J-O-E, would you have excellent reason to believe that this number is a "privileged" result as opposed to a chance result? Similarly, the probability of any random chain several hundred AAs in length ever emerging in nature is by itself vanishingly small. Unlike pro's examples, the context of nature does not guarantee the emergence of a single instance. But when we further consider that each of the AAs in the chain must all come from a defined subset comprising less than 10% of all AAs, that they must all exhibit left handed chirality, that they all must be bound exclusively by peptide bonds, and that a primary protein structure results, specified complexity is on clear display. Pro's confessed aim in this debate is to propose a possible "proto life." His entire presentation comes from the realm of the hypothetical. He confidently assures us that "cumulative, sophisticated systems" can emerge in nature, that autocatalytic processes are "rather life like," that ribozymes are ribozomes waiting to happen and so forth. He assures us that these kinds of things are favored by nature. But if this is true, we surely should have discovered at least one unambiguous example of a "proto life" by now. An empirical example would go a long way to elevating pro's case. He does not provide us with any and it is glaringly obvious why not. Pro consistently offers simple deterministic redundant processes as explanations for the most advanced cybernetic systems we have ever encountered. It simply does not add up. It simply does not work. Most origin of life research is grounded in a belief in abiogenesis, dedicated to proposing how it might have happened. To date, abiogenesis remains elusive. Indeed, the only consistent result that has arisen out the extensive OOL enterprise is that time and again even the most modest triumphs that show any promise towards life require extensive steering of events, careful selection of conditions, establishing and arranging the actualization of targets, repeated purifying processes; in short, massive infusions of intelligent design! Certainly not the stuff of natural processes. OOL researchers are free to speculate all they wish, but their speculation is rooted in an entirely unproven assumption. Empirical reality points in the opposite direction. Life has never been shown to be the result of a seamless process of successive, "inevitable" natural states. Rather, life is clearly distinguished from the natural world, and it is distinguished specifically by its cybernetic and information properties. Pro has never touched either of these distinguishing characteristics. There are good reasons for this. For cybernetic systems and information systems to come into existence, certain attributes are required: planning, problem solving, bona fide organization (as opposed to mere self-ordering), deliberate steering of events toward functional target results, to name a few. None of these attributes are available to nature. They are exclusive to intelligent agents. The information of life is objectively real. It has led us into levels of understanding not possible before the sequence hypothesis. It is enshrined in textbooks[20]. It is the stuff of college degrees[21]. It drives exciting new fields of research[22]. It is axiomatic in today's scientific literature that information lies at the foundation of life. In this debate I have presented peer reviewed citations to support the following: *the information of life is semiotic *life is cybernetic *any pre existing genetic code has to have been at least as complex as the current one *any system capable of self replication must contain subsystems comparable to those of living systems today. *even the simplest life form likely requires at least 250-400 genes with their associated proteins and systems. Pro, on the other hand, has steadfastly refused to deal with this fundamental reality of life. He has exhibited a failure to understand his own citations, as I have documented in the cases of peptide bonds and cytochrome C. Indeed, upon examination, virtually all of his citations unabashedly employ the same language of speculation that runs throughout his presentation here. Pro is free to believe what he wishes, but the hypothetical "things" he proposes fall well short of the simplest possible life form. Based on everything we know to be true, the only cause capable of producing what life really is - cybernetic information based systems - is intelligent agency. No known natural processes are capable of producing anything we can describe as being alive. [15] http://journal.frontiersin.org... [16] http://www.washington.edu... [17] Shannon's Channel Capacity Theorem [18] "Theory of Self-reproducing Automata," Von Neumann, 1966. [19] a term first coined by Leslie Orgel, rigorously and extensively developed by mathematician Bill Dembski [20] excerpt from the standard college textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell: "Living Cells, like computers, deal in information...All living cells on earth, without any known exception, store their hereditary information in the form of...DNA" [21] many schools now offer degrees in bioinformatics [22] the research field of bioinformatics is actually a mature field by now, being almost as old as the Sequence Hypothesis