Michael Behe's defense of the design argument continues.

 Michael Behe Answers More Reasonable Objections to Intelligent Design 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

Michael Behe Answers More Reasonable Objections to Intelligent Design

A new ID the Future episode continues A Mousetrap for Darwin author Michael Behe’s conversation with philosopher Pat Flynn, focused on some of the more substantive objections to Behe’s case for intelligent design in biology. In this segment the pair discuss the bacterial flagellum, the cilium, and the blood clotting cascade, and tackle critiques from Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Russell Doolittle, Kenneth Miller, and others. Download the podcast or listen to it here. e.

And still even yet more on the OOL'S anti-Darwinian bias

Forming Polymers: A Problem for the Origin of Life 

Walter Bradley 

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the fourth entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here. 

Assume for a moment that there was some way to produce simple organic molecules on the early Earth. Perhaps these molecules did form a primordial soup, or perhaps they arose near some high-energy hydrothermal vent. Either way, origin-of-life theorists must then explain how amino acids or other key organic molecules linked up to form long chains (polymers), thereby forming proteins or RNA through a process called polymerization. 

A Popular Model 

A problem for the primordial soup version of this model is that it would be at chemical equilibrium, without any free energy for organic monomers to react further.1 Indeed, chemically speaking, the last place you would want to link amino acids or other monomers into chains would be a vast, water-based environment like the primordial soup or in the ocean near a hydrothermal vent. As the U.S. National Academy of Sciences acknowledges, “Two amino acids do not spontaneously join in water. Rather, the opposite reaction is thermodynamically favored.”2 Origin-of-life theorists Stanley Miller and Jeffrey Bada similarly acknowledged that the polymerization of amino acids into peptides “is unfavorable in the presence of liquid water at all temperatures.”3 In other words, water breaks protein chains of monomers back down into amino acids (or other constituents), making it very difficult to produce proteins (or other polymers like RNA) in the primordial soup or underwater near a hydrothermal vent. 

The hydrothermal vent model is popular among origin-of-life theorists because it represents a high-energy environment, but this model faces additional problems. Hydrothermal vents tend to be short-lived, lasting perhaps only hundreds of years4 — timescales so short that the origin of life at undersea vents has been said to be “essentially akin to spontaneous generation.”5 It is also difficult to envision how prebiotic chemicals could become concentrated in such a chaotic, unbounded oceanic environment.6 

The Biggest Obstacle 

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to the origin of life at hydrothermal vents is implied in their name: extremely high temperatures. According to Scientific American, experiments by Miller and Bada on the durability of prebiotic compounds near vents showed that the superheated water would “destroy rather than create complex organic compounds.”7

In the view of Miller and Bada, “organic synthesis would not occur in hydrothermal vent waters,” indicating that vents are not an option for the origin of life because “[a]ny origin-of-life theory that proposes conditions of temperature and time inconsistent with the stability of the compounds involved can be dismissed solely on that basis.”8 Some might reply that certain alkaline thermal vents have lower temperatures,9 but the high pH present near alkaline vents tend to precipitate carbon into carbonate minerals, with very little carbon remaining in the seawater for prebiotic chemical reactions,10 and such a high pH is highly destructive to RNA.11 As one paper put it, “the evolution of RNA is unlikely to have occurred in the vicinity of an alkaline deep-sea hydrothermal vent.”12 

Notes 

1)Nick Lane, John F. Allen, and William Martin, “How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life,” BioEssays 2 (2010), 271-280.

2)Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2007), 60.

3)Stanley Miller and Jeffrey Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life,” Nature 334 (August 18, 1988), 609-611.

4)John Horgan, “In the Beginning,” Scientific American 264 (February 1991), 116-125. Horgan is discussing the research of Miller and Bada in Miller and Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life.” 

5)Jeffrey L. Bada, “New insights into prebiotic chemistry from Stanley Miller’s spark discharge experiments,” Chemical Society Review 42 (2013), 2186-2196.

6)Koichiro Matsuno and Eiichi Imai, “Hydrothermal Vent Origin of Life Models,” Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, eds. Gargaud M. et al. (Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2015), 1162-1166.

7)Horgan, “In the Beginning.”

8)Miller and Bada, “Submarine hot springs and the origin of life.” See also Stanley L. Miller and Antonio Lazcano, “The Origin of Life Did It Occur at High Temperatures?,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 41 (1995), 689-692.

9)Matsuno and Imai, “Hydrothermal Vent Origin of Life Models”; Deborah S. Kelley et al., “An off-axis hydrothermal vent field near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at 30°N,” Nature 412 (July 12, 2001), 145-149; Deborah S. Kelley et al., “A Serpentinite-Hosted Ecosystem: The Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” Science 307 (March 4, 2005), 1428-1434.

10)Norio Kitadai and Shigenori Maruyama, “Origins of building blocks of life: A review,” Geoscience Frontiers 9 (2018), 1117-1153.

11)Harold S. Bernhardt and Warren P. Tate, “Primordial soup or vinaigrette: did the RNA world evolve at acidic pH?,” Biology Direct 7 (2012), 4.

12)Bernhardt and Tate, “Primordial soup or vinaigrette?” 

 

The Manhattan project a brief history.

Manhattan Project, U.S. government research project (1942–45) that produced the first atomic bombs.

American scientists, many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe, took steps in 1939 to organize a project to exploit the newly recognized fission process for military purposes. The first contact with the government was made by G.B. Pegram of Columbia University, who arranged a conference between Enrico Fermi and the Navy Department in March 1939. In the summer of 1939, Albert Einstein was persuaded by his fellow scientists to use his influence and present the military potential of an uncontrolled fission chain reaction to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. In February 1940, $6,000 was made available to start research under the supervision of a committee headed by L.J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards (later National Institute of Standards and Technology). On December 6, 1941, the project was put under the direction of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush. 

After the U.S. entry into World War II, the War Department was given joint responsibility for the project, because by mid-1942 it was obvious that a vast array of pilot plants, laboratories, and manufacturing facilities would have to be constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so that the assembled scientists could carry out their mission. In June 1942 the Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan District was initially assigned management of the construction work (because much of the early research had been performed at Columbia University, in Manhattan), and in September 1942 Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves was placed in charge of all Army activities (chiefly engineering activities) relating to the project. “Manhattan Project” became the code name for research work that would extend across the country. It was known in 1940 that German scientists were working on a similar project and that the British were also exploring the problem. In the fall of 1941 Harold C. Urey and Pegram visited England to attempt to set up a cooperative effort, and by 1943 a combined policy committee with Great Britain and Canada was established. In that year a number of scientists of those countries moved to the United States to join the project there.

If the project were to achieve success quickly, several lines of research and development had to be carried on simultaneously before it was certain whether any might succeed. The explosive materials then had to be produced and be made suitable for use in an actual weapon. 

Uranium-235, the essential fissionable component of the postulated bomb, cannot be separated from its natural companion, the much more abundant uranium-238, by chemical means; the atoms of these respective isotopes must rather be separated from each other by physical means. Several physical methods to do this were intensively explored, and two were chosen—the electromagnetic process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, under Ernest Orlando Lawrence and the diffusion process developed under Urey at Columbia University. Both of these processes, and particularly the diffusion method, required large, complex facilities and huge amounts of electric power to produce even small amounts of separated uranium-235. Philip Hauge Abelson developed a third method called thermal diffusion, which was also used for a time to effect a preliminary separation. These methods were put into production at a 70-square-mile (180-square-km) tract near Knoxville, Tennessee, originally known as the Clinton Engineer Works, later as Oak Ridge 

Only one method was available for the production of the fissionable material plutonium-239. It was developed at the metallurgical laboratory of the University of Chicago under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and involved the transmutation in a reactor pile of uranium-238. In December 1942 Fermi finally succeeded in producing and controlling a fission chain reaction in this reactor pile at Chicago. 

Quantity production of plutonium-239 required the construction of a reactor of great size and power that would release about 25,000 kilowatt-hours of heat for each gram of plutonium produced. It involved the development of chemical extraction procedures that would work under conditions never before encountered. An intermediate step in putting this method into production was taken with the construction of a medium-size reactor at Oak Ridge. The large-scale production reactors were built on an isolated 1,000-square-mile (2,600-square-km) tract on the Columbia River north of Pasco, Washington—the Hanford Engineer Works. 

Before 1943, work on the design and functioning of the bomb itself was largely theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at a number of different locations. In that year a laboratory directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe. This laboratory had to develop methods of reducing the fissionable products of the production plants to pure metal and fabricating the metal to required shapes. Methods of rapidly bringing together amounts of fissionable material to achieve a supercritical mass (and thus a nuclear explosion) had to be devised, along with the actual construction of a deliverable weapon that would be dropped from a plane and fused to detonate at the proper moment in the air above the target. Most of these problems had to be solved before any appreciable amount of fissionable material could be produced, so that the first adequate amounts could be used at the fighting front with minimum delay. 

By the summer of 1945, amounts of plutonium-239 sufficient to produce a nuclear explosion had become available from the Hanford Works, and weapon development and design were sufficiently far advanced so that an actual field test of a nuclear explosive could be scheduled. Such a test was no simple affair. Elaborate and complex equipment had to be assembled so that a complete diagnosis of success or failure could be had. By this time the original $6,000 authorized for the Manhattan Project had grown to $2 billion. 

The first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, at a site on the Alamogordo air base 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was detonated on top of a steel tower surrounded by scientific equipment, with remote monitoring taking place in bunkers occupied by scientists and a few dignitaries 10,000 yards (9 km) away. The explosion came as an intense light flash, a sudden wave of heat, and later a tremendous roar as the shock wave passed and echoed in the valley. A ball of fire rose rapidly, followed by a mushroom cloud extending to 40,000 feet (12,200 metres). The bomb generated an explosive power equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT); the tower was completely vaporized and the surrounding desert surface fused to glass for a radius of 800 yards (730 metres). The following month, two other atomic bombs produced by the project, the first using uranium-235 and the second using plutonium, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica •