Abiogenesis is a reasonable theory for the beginnings of life

Well, I'm glad Con thought it worth his time to open my links and directly respond to them after the second time quoting them. I'll be happy to hit those responses directly, but first, I'll go through the rest of his responses. I agree, my burden is to prove that it could have happened in early earth. Since many of the papers I've cited have utilized materials that were likely available in early earth, it is now Con's responsibility to present the "millions" of compounds somehow capable of interfering with this process. He was very clear that this was the problem, yet the link he used contained nothing of the sort. Interesting that he keeps using that line of thought throughout this post, again without any proof that a multitude of such substances exist (and neither of his new links address it either), and without response to my concentration argument. Again: hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of square miles of ocean create a lot of opportunities. And it only needed to happen once. This doesn't have to be Aqua Fina, as Con suggests, but if he wants to state that so many interfering molecules existed (and actually back that up), he also has to prove that they were at high enough concentration to inhibit everything across the whole planet. Con states that viroids and satellite RNAs cannot propagate in the absence of protein. This RNA propagation seems to have become his main line of attack on my case at this point, but I'll grant that he's correct here. Viroids and satellite RNAs both require enzymes to propagate. Of course, we've both agreed they're not life, just examples of the functionality of RNA, so they simply exist as examples of ribozymes and RNA's capacity to engage in information storage. Con has a very strange way of looking at a line of text. "[Nucleotides formed in a lab] in the absence of enzymes or inorganic catalysts." When I see this sentence, I interpret it as meaning that enzymes and inorganic catalysts can help make nucleotides, but that nucleotides can also form in their absence. When my opponent sees this line, he apparently believes that enzymes " somehow made from a world that contains no ribosomes " and inorganic catalysts are actively preventing the process of RNA formation. I'm having a hard time seeing that. If anyone needs the context, I guess we could look back at my [15] and my opponent's [3]. Seems incredibly simple to note that they're arguing that the formation of nucleotides can occur in the absence AND presence of enzymes and inorganic catalysts. "One can contemplate an RNA World, containing only RNA molecules that serve to catalyze the synthesis of themselves." He keeps using this one, and even now that he's explained why, I don't understand it. It seems he now wants to call this ludicrous since it assumes an RNA-only world. I'm sorry, does it say in that quote that RNA is the only thing that exists in that world? Did I say in any of my posts that RNA was the only thing that existed? If anything, that would make this impossible " you need the inorganic phosphate, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen to keep building more nucleotides and creating these bonds. You need organic compounds, like formamide (my [13]). Walter was well aware that such molecules existed in the oceans of an early earth, even when he wrote this back in the 1980's. It doesn't showcase anything silly or fantasy unless you interpret it as Con somehow has managed to do. I'm glad my opponent has reworded his argument on sufficiency, as it would have been very damaging to his case. I don't think he's proven insufficiency. But he's made a new mistake: Con has thrown all of his eggs into one basket here. My burden is to prove that RNA is sufficient for the formation of life. As my opponent has agreed to the definition I laid out for life (or at least, has not made any efforts to contradict it), I must prove that an organism could exist that utilizes RNA, organic, and inorganic compounds and is able to engage in metabolism, reproduction, and adaptation. We have no questioning of metabolism or adaptation, and therefore reproduction is all we are left with. And so it's come down to two of my links, specifically my [2] and [3]. (I'll recite them for ease of access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov..., http://www.sciencemag.org...) By quoting small portions of them, my opponent appears to think them discarded. He hasn't read them very carefully. His response to my [2] is incredibly flippant, especially since this is a follow-on experiment to [3] and improves on their findings. Not only did he apparently avoid some of the most important parts of this paper, which showed that they could exceed 20 nucleotides of extension, but it also had a lower error rate, was faster at incorporating nucleotides, and could function in a variety of environments that weren't optimal for its activity. Con is likely to point out that this is not sufficient to replicate the whole strand (I'll get to that later), but he shares an interesting quote in his post, one he took out of context. The line "an RNA system with true autoreplicative potential" wasn't in reference to their results, but rather in reference to the results of my [3], and if he had read further into the introduction of this paper instead of stopping there, he might have noticed that they went on to say that they had at least partially solved for the problems involved in isolating more efficient ribozymes. This is the entire point of this paper " it's not to point out that they've isolated the one thing that specifically made it possible for an RNA-based organism to replicate, but that a selection system could be used to produce a more efficient ribozyme. Again, we wouldn't be here having this conversation if I could just show you all the pieces of such an organism today, otherwise we would have already reconstructed such an organism. But this substantially improves the likelihood that a long-term selection system could well have produced the RNA polymerase ribozymes necessary to make this possible. In case this doesn't prove it well enough, you could look at this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...) and this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...), both of which analyze this process with more depth. My [3] is where he spends most of his time. One of the most important aspects that he left out of his analysis was how this paper reveals that primer extension " the main mode by which RNAs are replicated, even with enzymes " is non-specific with this ribozyme, and therefore capable of recognizing a lot of different substrates. That's a big omission, since it ensures that this would have multiple opportunities to replicate various RNAs so long as they have just a few nucleotides of RNA base paired to them. This means that it could have easily replicated all available RNAs so long as a few nucleotides were floating around. His main complaint with this citation appears to be that it doesn't reproduce the whole strand, often stopping at 14 nt or fewer. That's a problem with polymerization efficiency, or the amount of time that the ribozyme stays on the RNA strand and keeps adding nucleotides. Three problems with this. One, the paper addresses it: "the increase in polymerization efficiency would have to be more substantial, although not beyond the degree of optimization achieved previously with other in vitro experiments." This means that the worst he can claim is slightly less likelihood. Two, ever heard of lagging-strand synthesis? These are processes that occur on DNA, where primer has to be added multiple times and primer extension also occurs multiple times, creating Okazaki fragments. (http://www.nature.com...) A DNA ligase is used to unite these extensions. RNA ligase ribozymes have been discovered, which can self-replicate (http://www.pnas.org...) and even function in much lower than optimal concentrations of necessary molecules (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...). These could have been used to produce full replication of longer RNA strands. The replication process slower, but entirely plausible. Three, my number [2] presents an advance over the ribozyme made in this paper, one that is higher fidelity (less mistakes) and more efficiency (longer products). Further evolution is obviously possible, producing a ribozyme capable of replication of longer strands. He also tries to use one portion of the discussion from [3] against me. This is just another example of my opponent utilizing an old paper to outdo a new one. The absurd part of this is that he reused one of his own links to do so! If he looks at the citation provided in the paper, it turns out to be the very Orgel/Joyce paper referred to in his Orgel citation in round 2, the one from 1999. The one that's directly responded to by my [15] (>120 nucleotides) and [17] (multiple 39-mers), both of which came later. This also ignores the existence of ribozyme RNA ligases, which could be used to paste together multiple shorter strands. So yes, my [3], which was also written before those two papers, buys into the mentality that was thought to be true up until just about 7 years ago. That doesn't prove your point, it's just another example of Con ignoring my citations and restating his. Lastly, Con seems to believe that the selection process utilized in [3] was only possible because of a lot of "babysitting." He is either deliberately ignoring natural selection or else doesn't believe it. In this case, the selective force is pretty simple to see: RNAs won't persist if they don't replicate, therefore the lack of such a ribozyme would lead to degradation of the whole population. The selective force is retention of the necessary steps of metabolism, which my opponent never responded to, thus creating a need to be filled by a RNA polymerase ribozyme.