Primeval tech vs. modern tech.

 Why AlphaFold Has Not Solved the Protein-Folding Problem.

Paul Nelson 

The online database AlphaFold represents an amazing breakthrough by any measure of the word “breakthrough.” Biology is a much stronger science today for having AlphaFold in its analytical armamentarium.

But the algorithm, powerful as it is, has NOT solved the protein-folding problem, if we take that problem to mean this:

predicting the three-dimensional conformation of a protein strictly from its primary DNA sequence, ab initio.

An analogy to natural language may help. Suppose I give you a character string in English which you’ve never seen before, with no surrounding semantic context, and no corresponding lexicon or dictionary referents, even approximate. Here are two such words — these are words used weekly in Nelson family conversations for over 25 years:

googlimasha

mecky

My wife and daughters know EXACTLY what these words mean. Do you? Unless we’ve told you, almost certainly not. (Scroll down to the end for their meanings.) As far as the reader is concerned, these words are singletons, and you can only guess at their meanings (functional roles in English).

AlphaFold uses existing sequences and their known conformations / structures to predict unknown structures. Under the natural language analogy, AlphaFold levers itself off the existing genetic and proteomic dictionaries. But if a sequence exists as a singleton, in an isolated region of sequence space, AlphaFold performs poorly. Which means the protein folding problem, in its original form, remains unsolved. 

Yours to Discover 

A new unpublished MS by Yves-Henri Sanejouand of the French National Centre for Scientific Research is worth your attention, in relation to the protein folding problem, but also the high frequency of unique (singleton) proteins in eukaryotic species. See, “On the unknown proteins of eukaryotic proteomes.” The fascinating implications of Sanejouand’s preliminary analysis are yours to discover.

But if one extends one’s scope to include ALL nucleic acid sequences on Earth (not just eukaryotes), things get really wild. In a new paper, in press at Environmental Microbiology, Eugene Koonin and colleagues argue that — given their sequence diversity — viruses on Earth must have many independent origins. See, “The global virome: how much diversity and how many independent origins?” 

No Current Viable Theory  

After you read Koonin et al.’s paper, reflect for a moment on its implications. The vast majority of nucleic acid diversity on this planet is unique, represented by singletons (emphasis added): 

…we can also roughly estimate the size of the virus pangenome, in other words, the total number of genes in the virosphere. Large viruses encompass many poorly conserved, species-specific genes that obviously represent the bulk of the virus pangenome. Assuming 10 such unique genes per virus species, there would be 108 to 1010 unique virus genes altogether, a vast gene repertoire, to put it modestly. 

All these sequences must have been processed through a ribosome, borrowed from a free-living cell. There is currently no viable theory for the replication of viral genomes without the simultaneous presence of organismal systems (basically, ribosomes) to be hijacked. Thus the evolutionary clock for the origin of 108 to 1010 viral genes cannot start ticking until the origin of ribosomes. 

This appears to be the Mother of All Waiting Times Problems.

Oh, and those words I mentioned earlier? “Googlimasha” is a noun. It means “what Paul made that afternoon for dinner, but doesn’t want to tell his daughters when he picks them up at the end of their school day, because they will complain that they’re not in the mood for pork chops, or whatever, and Paul — having just slaved over dinner prep — simply isn’t interested in their spoiled suburban bellyaching.”

As for “mecky,” it can be a noun but most often is an adjective. It describes the hybrid state of “heck” and “messy,” in other words, an awful situation getting steadily worse. In its noun form, it is a term of endearment for Paul himself, frequently used by his daughter who is now a high school science teacher in Yonkers, NY. 

Primeval tech continues to be the bane of Darwinism.

 Grand Central Station and Beyond: Molecular Machines Visualized in 3D 

David Coppedge 

Cryo-electron microscopy is allowing cell biologists to see irreducibly complex molecular machines in all their three-dimensional glory. We are privileged in our day to see things that earlier microscopists could not have dreamt were possible thanks to super-resolution imaging technologies. 

Cilia Update 

Molecular biologists at the University of Basel boasted this month about discovering a “miniature train station” at the base of the cilium. Evolution News readers may know that biologist Michael Behe spoke of these trains years ago in his first two books, based on what was then known about how cilia are constructed. A few attempts to animate cilia with earlier cryo-EM views, such as this one at XVIVO, reveal the parts of cilia and flagella and how they operate once constructed. But there’s nothing like imaging them with real microscopes at near-atomic resolution to see how they are built. The imagery of train stations seems appropriate. 

Cilia are firmly anchored to the cell at their base. “Here is the start station for cilia transport,” explains Hugo van den Hoek, first author of the study. “Trains are assembled here, loaded with cargo and placed on the rails.”There are a total of nine different rails inside cilia, called microtubules. Each of them consists of two tracks, one for outbound trains and one for inbound. The trains transport proteins such as signaling molecules and building materials to the tip of the cilia. At their destination station, the train is unloaded and disassembled. 

A combination of cryo-EM tomography and fluorescence microscopy allowed the research team to observe grand central station.  

“This powerful combination of technologies has allowed us to reconstruct the first molecular model of the ciliary base and observe how it regulates the assembly and entry of these large protein trains,” explains Paul Guichard.  

Anyone sense foresight here? Functional information?

The paper in Science by Van den Hoek et al., “In situ architecture of the ciliary base reveals the stepwise assembly of intraflagellar transport trains,” continues with the train metaphor over 90“Their findings elucidate how intraflagellar transport trains assemble before they enter cilia and demonstrate the possibility of visualizing dynamic events with molecular resolution inside native cells.” times

Illustrating Behe’s claim back in 1996 that scientific papers never explain how these machines could be made by a Darwinian process, this paper is again silent about evolution. It only notes that cilia and flagella are “evolutionarily conserved eukaryotic organelles” which implies that they appeared already working and have not evolved significantly since. They also mention serious diseases that result from faulty assembly of these exquisite ATP-powered moving machines. This also speaks to the impossibility of chance formatio

Readers can feast their eyes on the detailed images coming from these powerful new imaging technologies 

“Their findings elucidate how intraflagellar transport trains assemble before they enter cilia and demonstrate the possibility of visualizing dynamic events with molecular resolution inside native cells.” 

Cilia were also highlighted recently in news from Washington University. Engineers there would like to understand how cilia initiate their well-known beat motions to get ideas for treating ciliopathies and, perhaps, mimicking cilia in engineered machines for drug delivery or chemical sensing. 

Cilia are tiny, hair-like structures on cells throughout our bodies that beat rhythmically to serve a variety of functions when they are working properly, including circulating cerebrospinal fluid in brains and transporting eggs in fallopian tubes.

Defective cilia can lead to disorders including situs inversus — a condition where a person’s organs develop on the side opposite of where they usually are. 

Their work was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 

Kir2.1: An Elegant Ion Channel 

Cryo-electron microscopy unveiled another marvelous molecular machine to the eyes of researchers at the Sorbonne. It’s called Kir2.1, part of a family of potassium channels that create the voltage used by neurons. Here’s what Kir2.1 does for us: 

Inward-rectifier potassium (Kir) channels are a group of integral membrane proteins that selectively control the permeation of K+ (potassium) ions across cell membranes. They are particular in that the channels conduct K+ions easier in the inward direction (into the cell) than in the outward direction (out of the cell). The small outward K+ current through Kir channels controls the resting membrane potential and membrane excitability, regulates cardiac and neuronal electrical activities, couples insulin secretion to blood glucose levels, and maintains electrolyte balance. 

The source paper by Fernandes et al. was published open access in Science Advances allowing readers to see the beautiful images of this channel with its four-part structure and selectivity filter. They claim it is the “first structure” published of Kir2.1. The average resolution is at 4.3 Angstroms, with some parts at 3.7 Angstroms. Considering that the width of a hydrogen atom is about 1 Angstrom, that’s amazing.  

This is the first time that the entire human Kir2.1 channel has been resolved at high resolution; it is also the first cryo-EM structure of a Kir2 channel. 

How does the channel work as a rectifier, creating a voltage between inner and outer membranes? And how do they know when to act? 

The inward-rectification mechanism results from a block on the cytoplasmic side of the channels by endogenous polyamines and Mg2+ that plug the channel pore at depolarized potentials, resulting in decreased outward currents. The blockers are then removed from the pore when the K+ ions flow into the cell at hyperpolarized potentials. This voltage-dependent block results in efficient conduction of current only in the inward direction. In addition to being inwardly rectifying, Kir channels respond to a variety of intracellular messengers that directly control the channel gating, including phosphoinositides (PIPs), G proteins (Kir3 channels), adenosine 5′-triphosphate (Kir6 channels), and changes in pH (Kir1 channels). The Kir family is encoded by 16 genes (KCNJ1 to KCNJ18) and classified in seven subfamilies (Kir1 to Kir7). 

The Kir2.1 channel doesn’t just sit there in the membrane selecting potassium ions; it moves! It flexes and bends during operation. Readers can download six movies of the machine undergoing its precise conformational changes. 

As the channel flexes, specific contacts between amino acids are made and broken to permit the accurate passage of potassium ions through the selectivity filter and three other constriction points, one called the G-loop where final potassium gating is thought to occur. The constrictions, as narrow as 1/5 of an Angstrom, act like gates that block everything until the right potassium ion has been authenticated. Here’s a taste of the precision: 

In conclusion, our human Kir2.1 channel cryo-EM structure describes a well-connected interaction networkbetween the PIP2-binding site residues, R218 and K219, and the G-loop region (E303) via residues R312 and H221. Our data suggest that the conformational changes required for the G-loop opening are most likely controlled by PIP2 binding. The replacement of R312 with histidine leads to a complete loss of the interaction network described above. Therefore, the interaction network integrity between subunits seems necessary for the proper allosteric transmission of the signal between R312 and the G-loop of the adjacent subunit upon PIP2 binding, which possibly allows the release of the constriction point on the G-loop. We can then hypothesize a PIP2-dependent G-loop gating mechanism that consists of the following: PIP2 binding triggers local conformational changes in the position of the side and main chains of R218 and K219, which, because of the structural proximity, lead to significant changes in the position of H221, displacing it laterally toward the intracellular medium. This movement would, in turn, cause E303 and R312 of the adjacent chain to move in the same direction, causing the G-loop to open. 

Without meaning to overdo the technical jargon, the design only becomes evident in the details. Once again, readers will look in vain for any mention of how this channel emerged or evolved. 

Zechariah ch.l the Bible in living English.

  

Zechariah ch.1 BibLE.

On the eighth new moon in the year two of Darius, Jehovah’s word came to the prophet Zecariah the son of Berekiah the son of ʽIddo, 2 “Jehovah was provoked at your fathers. 3 And say to them ‘Says Jehovah of Armies, Come back to me, quoth Jehovah of Armies, and I will come back to you, says Jehovah of Armies. 4 Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets called out “Says Jehovah of Armies, Come back from your bad courses and practices” and they did not hear nor listen to me, quoth Jehovah. 5 Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever? 6 But my words and my decrees with which I charged my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? and they turned back and said “As Jehovah of Armies designed to do to us, in accordance with our courses and practices, so he has done with us.”’”

7* On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month (the month of Shebat) in the year two of Darius, Jehovah’s word came to the prophet Zecariah the son of Berekiah the son of ʽIddo, 8** “I saw last night, and there was a man riding on a brown pony standing between the myrtles in the bog, and behind him ponies brown, sorrel, and white. 9 And I said ‘What are these, sir?’ and the angel that was speaking with me said to me ‘I will let you see what these are.’ 10 And the man standing between the myrtles answered ‘These are what Jehovah has sent to patrol the earth.’ 11 And they answered Jehovah’s angel that stood between the myrtles ‘We have patrolled the earth and find all the earth settled and quiet.’ 12 And Jehovah’s angel answered ‘Jehovah of Armies, how long before you will have any tenderness for Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, to which you have been hostile these seventy years?’ 13 And Jehovah answered the angel that was speaking with me with kindly words, comforting words; 14 and the angel that was speaking with me said to me ‘Call out “Says Jehovah of Armies, I am greatly jealous for Jerusalem and Sion, 15 and I am greatly incensed with the nations that are at ease, because I had been a little incensed and they helped on to disaster. 16 So Jehovah says, I have come back to Jerusalem in tenderness; my house shall be built in it, quoth Jehovah of Armies, and a measuring-line shall be stretched over Jerusalem.” 17 Call out again “Says Jehovah of Armies, My cities shall again overflow with good things, and Jehovah will again comfort Sion and again choose Jerusalem.”’”

18 And I raised my eyes and saw, and there were four horns; 19* and I said to the angel that was speaking with me “What are these?” and he said to me “These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel and Jerusalem.” 20 And Jehovah showed me four smiths; 21** and I said “What are these coming to do?” and he said “These are the horns that have scattered Judah so that not a man raised his head; and these have come to sharpen blades to knock off the horns of the nations that raised horns against the country of Judah to scatter it.”

Re: a diagnosis of the state of OOL science; We've got bad news and worse news.

An Optimistic Solution to the Mystery of Life’s Origin 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

Editor’s note: We have been 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 ninth and final 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. 

One might think that, in this series, we have been overly pessimistic in our analysis of the current status of origin-of-life research. But consider what five prestigious origin-of-life thinkers say about the current status of origin-of-life research:

Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak: “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from non-living matter…Thus, explaining how life began entails a serious paradox.”1

Harvard chemist George Whitesides: “Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea… We need a really good new idea.”2 “I don’t understand how you go from a system that’s random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. I just don’t understand how that works.”3

“Origin of Life” entry in the Springer Encyclopedia of Astrobiology by Mexican biologist Antonio Lazcano: “A century and a half after Darwin admitted how little was understood about the origin of life, we still do not know when and how the first living beings appeared on Earth.”4

Richard Dawkins, leading evolutionary biologist and New Atheist: “The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple…The fact that it did not — the fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing — is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.”5

Eugene Koonin, a prestigious biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information: “The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, inter-disciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the ‘dirty’ rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching or even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the ‘dirty’ rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure — we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.”6 

An Alternative Solution  

But there is an alternative solution to the information sequence problem and the mystery of life’s origin — and it has the benefit of being based upon our uniform experience with how information arises. I (Walter Bradley) and my coauthors hinted at this solution in the original edition of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, published in 1984, wherein we observed, “We know by experience that intelligent investigators can synthesize proteins and build genes” and concluded that “intelligence is the authentic source of the information in the biological world.”7 In 2020, Discovery Institute published an updated edition of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, and all involved in the project were struck by how few changes were needed, owing to the fact that little meaningful progress had been made in the field of origin-of-life research over the previous 35 years. Stephen C. Meyer, James Tour, Brian Miller, and other scientists also contributed chapters updating the arguments.  

A Last Word from Meyer 

As the baton is passed to the next generation of ID theorists, it’s worth giving Meyer, a Cambridge University-trained philosopher of science, the last word as his chapter in the 2020 edition of Mystery expanded our arguments that ID is the only known cause for the information-rich biomolecules required for the origin of life: 

[O]ur uniform experience affirms that specified information — whether inscribed in hieroglyphs, written in a book, encoded in a terrestrial radio signal, or produced in an RNA-world “ribozyme engineering” experiment — always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind and not a strictly material process. So the discovery of the functionally specified digital information in DNA and RNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of these molecules. Whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most likely explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA and RNA is that it too had an intelligent source. Intelligent design best explains the specified genetic information necessary to produce the first living cell.8 

ID theorists thus propose that the action of an intelligent agent was required for the origin of the first living cell. In keeping with their materialistic outlook, meanwhile, mainstream origin-of-life theorists still maintain, as they must, that a self-replicating cell arose naturally. Darwinian evolution then took things the rest of the way and allowed the grand diversity of living organisms to evolve.  

Notes 

1.Alonso Ricardo and Jack W. Szostak, “Life on Earth,” Scientific American (September 2009), 54-61.

2.George M. Whitesides, “Revolutions in Chemistry: Priestley Medalist George M. Whitesides’ Address,” Chemical and Engineering News 85 (March 26, 2007), 12-17.

3.Conor Myhrvold, “Three Questions for George Whitesides,” MIT Technology Review (September 3, 2012), https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/09/03/184017/three-questions-for-george-whitesides/ (accessed November 18, 2020).

4.Antonio Lazcano, “Origin of Life,” Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, eds. M. Gargaud et al. (Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2011), 1184.

6.Richard Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 613.

7.Eugene V. Koonin, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), 391.

8.Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (Dallas, TX: Lewis and Stanley, 1984), 193, 197.

9. Stephen C. Meyer, “Evidence of Intelligent Design in the Origin of Life,” The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2020), 455-456. 

On time

From the standpoint of the scriptures time is purely abstract, qualia not quanta that is to say it is purely discriptive. Thus time as understood from the bible's(I e JEHOVAH'S) standpoint has no beginning any more than numbers or color  had a beginning. The equating of the beginning of the physical universe with a beginning of time ,space and energy is unscriptural  potential energy has always existed within God 

Isaiah40:26KJV"26Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth." 

Thus the visible creation is an infinitesimal actualisation of JEHOVAH'S limitless potential. 

The bible does not speak of the creation as being ex nihilo out of nothing  but ex auto  out of him i.e JEHOVAH 

1Corinthians8:6KJV"6But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom((Grk.ex hou) are all things," the visible creation is not the beginning of JEHOVAH'S creation the scriptures speak of a higher creation that preceded the one accessible to man's senses 

Hebrews9:11KJV"But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation." Also 

Proverbs8:22NJB"Yahweh created me, first-fruits of his fashioning, before the oldest of his works."  

Note too this passage from the book of Job which demonstrates that JEHOVAH was definitely not alone before the physical creation. 

Job38:4-7NJB"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Tell me, since you are so well-informed!

5 Who decided its dimensions, do you know? Or who stretched the measuring line across it?

6 What supports its pillars at their bases? Who laid its cornerstone

7 to the joyful concert of the morning stars and unanimous acclaim of the sons of God? "

 

 He was accompanied by a family of appreciative offspring prior to the creation of man and the universe that would become man's permanent home. 

Too speak of a concrete reality as existing beyond time is to utter an absurdity. Apart from time there can be no temporal distinctions hence nothing can sensibly proclaimed to be before or after time itself. And of course if time is a creation then it not only has a beginning but an end and thus free moral agency is impossible not only for man but for God himself we are all imprisoned in the delusion of choice including time's maker. In such a universe would even the concept moral rectitude be possible?

Christendom continues to be an embarrassment to God and Christ.

 Moscow patriarch: Russian war dead have their sins forgiven

The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church says Russian soldiers who die in the line of duty in Ukraine have all of their sins forgiven

ByPETER SMITH Associated Press

September 27, 2022, 3:53 PM

 soldiers who die in the line of duty in Ukraine have all of their sins forgiven, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church proclaimed in a sermon, comparing their sacrificial death to that of Jesus.

The assertion, made on Sunday, ratchets up Moscow Patriarch Kirill's already staunch support for Russia's war on Ukraine since its beginning in February.

Kirill has characterized the war as part of a larger metaphysical struggle against an encroaching liberal West, which he depicts as demanding gay pride parades. He has echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s depiction of Ukraine as spiritually and politically tied to Russia through their common medieval roots.

But Kirill's latest words raise the rhetorical stakes at a time when Russia has begun mobilizing reservists and has taken steps to annex parts of eastern Ukraine in the wake of military losses to Ukrainian forces.

“If someone, driven by a sense of duty, the need to fulfill an oath, remains true to his calling and dies in the line of military duty, then he undoubtedly commits an act that is tantamount to a sacrifice,” Kirill said in the sermon. 

  He sacrifices himself for others," Kirill said. "And therefore we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”

He compared the sacrifice to that of Jesus on the cross.

His words came even as thousands of Russians have sought to avoid the chance for such martyrdom — leaving the country by land and air rather than being swept up in the mobilization.

Critics of the war were appalled by Kirill's valorization of soldiers fighting in what much of the West has denounced as a war of aggression, accompanied by alleged human rights abuses.

Kirill replaced the Christian concept of martyrdom “with the idea of religious terrorism,” said the Rev. Cyril Hovorun, an Orthodox priest, native of Ukraine and professor of ecclesiology, international relations and ecumenism at University College Stockholm.Martyrs sacrifice their own lives, but religiously motivated terrorists ”sacrifice their lives and the lives of others," said Hovorun, founder of Orthodox Against War, a project launched after the start of the war. “And the (Russian Orthodox Church) is trying to find an excuse for this activity.”

The patriarch is speaking to an audience of one, Hovorun said.

“I don’t know whom can he convince, because the Russians are listening to him less and less,” Hovorun said. “However, I think the main addressee of Kirill’s messages is Putin. Kirill, through these messages, communicates to Putin: I am with you."

Kirill repeatedly described the war as “fratricidal" and prayed that it not destroy “the single spiritual space of Holy Russia."

But his unswerving support for the war has already helped precipitate a historic rupture in that space. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the majority religion in both countries. The Urainian Orthodox Church — which had remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate until this year, even when other Orthodox in Ukraine had broken away — declared its independence in May. By then, many priests and bishops had ceased commemorating Kirill in their public worship, a ritually potent snub.

———

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Ps. 2Peter2:2NIV"Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute."

Origin of life has all the time in the world?

Origin of Life: Saved by Time? 

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 fifth 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. 

Many materialists believe that the severe unlikelihood of the series of events required for the origin of life is not a serious problem because there is essentially unlimited time for these events to occur. George Wald expressed this sentiment in 1954, writing in Scientific American, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot.” Since he believed there were billions of years available for the origin of life on Earth, Wald poetically hoped, “Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: Time itself performs the miracles.”1 But time isn’t unlimited.  

A Hostile Environment 

First, the early Earth was a hostile environment for any nascent biomolecules and even early life. While the Earth formed at about 4.54 billion years ago, the crust did not begin to solidify until about 4.4 to perhaps as late as 4 billion years ago.2 Second, large bolide impact events occurred during the “heavy bombardment period” which lasted on Earth until about 3.8 billion years ago3 — impacts large enough to vaporize the oceans and sterilize Earth’s surface of any early life or prebiotic molecules.4 Third, there is now good evidence of cellular life existing as early as 3.77 billion years ago based upon the presence of microfossils in jasper cherts in the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada.5

Does this evidence imply less than 30 million years from the point at which Earth became habitable to the evidence of the first life? That may seem like a long time, but on geological timescales it is considered short.  

The Earliest Life 

Indeed, decades after Wald, such fossil evidence of early life led theorists to say things like “we are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the Earth’s surface and the origin of life”6 and “we are now thinking, in geochemical terms, of instant life…”7 While the precise dates of the earliest life and estimates of the onset of Earth habitability vary and these issues are debated vigorously in the literature, the point is clear: There is not unlimited time for the origin of life. 

Time is not the hero of the plot; rather, it is the antagonist. The Herculean feats required by origin-of-life models are matched only by the poverty of resources available on the early Earth in terms of time and available chemical reactants. No wonder Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who co-discovered the structure of DNA, lamented, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”8 Based upon current knowledge, the first life could not have arisen by purely natural means.  

Notes 

1)George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American (August 1954), 44-53.

2)Steering Committee on Science and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 5.

3)Ronny Schoenberg, Balz S. Kamber, Kenneth D. Collerson, and Stephen Moorbath, “Tungsten isotope evidence from, 3.8-Gyr metamorphosed sediments for early meteorite bombardment of the Earth,” Nature 418 (July 25, 2002), 403-405.

4)Norman H. Sleep, Kevin J. Zahnlet, James F. Kasting, and Harold J. Morowitz, “Annihilation of ecosystems by large asteroid impacts on the early Earth,” Nature 342 (November 9, 1989), 139-442; Kevin A. Maher and David J. Stevenson, “Impact frustration of the origin of life,” Nature 331 (February 18, 1988), 612-614; Norman H. Sleep and Kevin Zahnle, “Refugia from asteroid impacts on early Mars and the early Earth,” Journal of Geophysical Research 103 (November 25, 1998), 28, 529-528, 544; E.G. Nisbet and N.H. Sleep, “The habitat and nature of early life,” Nature 409 (February 22, 2001), 1083-1091. 

5)Matthew S. Dodd, Dominic Papineau, Tor Grenne, John F. Slack, Martin Rittner, Franco Pirajno, Jonathan O’Neil, and Crispin T.S. Little, “Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates,” Nature 543 (March 2, 2017), 60-64.

7)Stephen Jay Gould, “An Early Start,” Natural History 87 (February 1978), 10.

8)Cyril Ponnamperuma quoted in Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 76.

9)Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Touchstone, 1981), 88.

The Origin of Life's antiDarwinian bias continued some more.

 Still Unexplained: The First Living Cell 

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 seventh 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.  

In recent years, MIT physicist Jeremy England (pictured above) has gained media attention for proposing a thermodynamic energy-dissipation model of the origin of life. England’s view was summarized when he famously said that the origin and evolution of life “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” He continued, “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.”1Another physicist, ID theorist Brian Miller, has responded to England’s research.

Miller points out that the kind of energy that dissipates as a result of the sun shining on the Earth or other natural processes cannot explain how living systems have both low entropy (disorder) and high energy. As Miller puts it: “These are unnatural circumstances. Natural systems never both decrease in entropy and increase in energy — not at the same time.” Living cells do this “by employing complex molecular machinery and finely tuned chemical networks to convert one form of energy from the environment into high-energy molecules” — things that cannot be present prior to the origin of life because they must be explained by the origin of life. Without this cellular machinery to harness energy from the environment and drive down entropy, England’s energy-dissipation models cannot do the task they’ve been handed. As Miller said, England’s model cannot account for the origin of biological information, which “is essential for constructing and maintaining the cell’s structures and processes.”2 

A Crucial Deficiency 

Miller has highlighted a crucial deficiency in origin-of-life models: What is the origin of the cellular machinery, and the information that encodes the machinery that undergirds even the simplest cell? Forming a self-replicating RNA molecule, a seemingly impossible task under natural Earth conditions, is still a far cry from producing all the vast machinery required by cells to exist. A final obstacle for the RNA world — and any naturalistic account of the origin of life — is therefore its inability to explain the origin of the genetic code and the molecular machinery of life. 

There is an important distinction between the genetic code and the information in DNA or RNA: The genetic code is essentially the language in which the genetic information in the DNA or RNA is written. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines — which themselves are encoded by genetic information. This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them

To appreciate the obstacle this poses to materialistic accounts of the origin of life, consider the following analogy. If you have ever watched a DVD, you know that it is rich in information. However, without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: Intelligent agents designed both the player and the disk at the same time, and purposefully arranged the information on the disk in a language that could be read by the player. 

The Proper Machinery 

In the same way, genetic information could never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules — they perform and direct the very task that builds them. This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. A functional living cell therefore can’t evolve in a piecemeal fashion, but the likelihood of it arising all at once by unguided natural processes is far too low to be considered a viable model. 

Biologist Frank Salisbury explained this problem in American Biology Teacher in 1971, not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered: 

It’s nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes…[T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules…How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It’s as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don’t see them at the moment.3 

An Unsolved Problem 

The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International: 

The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical “hardware” capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message “receiver.” But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein “workers” produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.4 

Unless origin-of-life theorists can account for (1) the molecular machinery of the cell, (2) the information which encodes that machinery, and (3) the ability of cells to process that information to construct this machinery via a genetic code, the origin of even the simplest cell remains unexplained. Perhaps these seemingly intractable fundamental problems have an out: lots of time.  

Notes 

1)Jeremy England quoted in Natalie Wolchover, “A New Physics Theory of Life,” Quanta Magazine (January 22, 2014), https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ (accessed November 18, 2020).

2)Brian Miller, “Hot Wired,” Inference Review: International Review of Science 5 (May 2020), https://inference-review.com/article/hot-wired (accessed November 18, 2020).

3)Frank B. Salisbury, “Doubts About the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 33: 335-338 (September 1971).

4)J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, “Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life,” Cell Biology International, 28: 729-739 (2004).

What is meant by 'Son of God'?

Acts17:28KJV"For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. (or he is our Father)" 

Luke 3:38NIV"the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God." 

John 6:57NKJV "57As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father(i.e the Father caused me to live), so(in the same manner) he who feeds on Me will live because of Me."  

Luke 1:35NKJV"The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God." 

Acts13:33NKJV"God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm:

‘You are My Son,

Today I have begotten You.’"   note please that JEHOVAH'S restoring of his Son's life is spoken of as his begetting him anew. 

Proverbs8:22NJB"Yahweh created me, first-fruits of his fashioning, before the oldest of his works." 

To be clear JEHOVAH'S Wisdom is eternal hence uncreated like its possessor. Thus the passage speaks of the initial expression of this wisdom and not the wisdom itself. 

Proverbs8:30NJB"I was beside the master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence," Then this living derivative of JEHOVAH'S Wisdom proceeds to glorify its source by doing praiseworthy work. 

Colossians1:15_16NJB"He is the image of the unseen God, the first-born of all creation,

16 for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and everything invisible, thrones, ruling forces, sovereignties, powers -- all things were created through him and for him." Clearly a reference to proverbs8:22-30.

1Corinthians1:24NIV"but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." He is called logos one of the meanings of which is logic. He is JEHOVAH'S living rebuttal to those who accuse him of being a poor Father. He can only serve this purpose If he is truly  a Son i.e owes his life/existence to his Father.

On the big bang and Occam's razor.

Theoretical Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the Deficiency of Alternative Models to Big Bang Cosmology  

Brian Miller 

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder recently posted a very informative video asking “Did the Big Bang happen?” She explains why alternative theories to the Big Bang model fail to better explain the cosmological data. She also unintentionally affirms the fine-tuning argument for design in the universe.  

Success of the Big Bang Theory 

Hossenfelder begins by summarizing the evidence for Big Bang cosmology based on Einstein’s theory of relativity and the observed expansion of space. She also explains why the exact details of the early universe remain a mystery. Cosmologists have a limited understanding of the physics of this time when the energy of particles exceeded what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could generate. In addition, elucidating the dynamics of the universe’s earliest epoch requires a theory of quantum gravity, which does not currently exist. 

Even given these limitations, the Big Bang theory represents the best model since it is founded on general relativity, and Einstein’s theory is supported by numerous pieces of observational evidence such as the bending of light around stars. In addition, the standard model (i.e., Big Bang model with a cosmological constant and cold dark matter) predicts many observations such as the Cosmic Microwave Background and the galactic filaments using simple initial conditions. The universe’s initial state is assumed to approximate a uniform distribution of mass-energy. 

The standard model thus provides a “simple” explanation for the current state of the universe since it requires few variables. These include the variables in the relatively simple equations for the expansion of the universe, the initial mass-energy density, and the initial expansion rate. 

Deficiency of Other Models 

Hossenfelder then provides a deeply insightful exposition on the inferiority of other models. All other models rely on different equations for the dynamics of the early universe. But these equations can only generate our current state by choosing far more complex initial conditions: 

…Einstein’s equations together with their initial values in the early universe provide a simple explanation for the observations we make today. When I say simple, I mean simple in a quantitative way you need few numbers to specify. If you used a different equation, then the initial state would be more difficult. You’d need to put in more numbers. And the theory wouldn’t explain as much. 

The key problem is that nearly any set of equations could yield the current state of the universe with the right choice of initial conditions. But neither the theory’s underlying equations nor the initial conditions can be independently verified. And the alternative theories provide no additional knowledge. Hossenfelder summarizes as follows:  

And then they also need a different initial state, so you might no longer find a Big Bang. As I said earlier, you can always do this, because for any evolution law there will be some initial state that will give you the right prediction for today. The problem is that this makes a simple explanation more complicated, so these theories are not scientifically justifiable. They don’t improve the explanatory power of the standard cosmological model. Another way to put it is that all those complicated ideas for how the universe began are unnecessary to explain what we observe. 

The God Hypothesis 

Hossenfelder lists several theories that fall under her critique including Penrose’s cyclic cosmology, the ekpyrotic universe that postulates colliding membranes, and the no-boundary proposal by Jim Hartle and Stephen Hawking. Stephen Meyer also critiqued these theories in his book Return of the God Hypothesis. But Meyer came to starkly different conclusions.

Hossenfelder concludes that “we are facing the limits of science itself.” And the question of the universe’s origin “we’ll never be able to answer.” In contrast, Meyer argues that the evidence for a beginning and the required fine tuning of the universe to support life point to a mind behind our world. The fact that all alternative cosmological theories require highly specific initial conditions to explain our present life-friendly universe only reinforces the fine-tuning argument and by extension the God Hypothesis

 . 

 

Rosh hashana a brief history.

 Rosh Hashana 

 

Encyclopedia Britannica

Rosh Hashana

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Rosh Hashana

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Alternate titles: Day of Judgment, Day of Remembrance, Rosh Ha-shanah, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Ha-Zikkaron, Yom Teruah

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History

Rosh Hashana, (Hebrew: “Beginning of the Year”) , Hashana also spelled Hashanah or Ha-shanah, also called Day of Judgment or Day of Remembrance, a major Jewish observance now accepted as inaugurating the religious New Year on Tishri 1 (September or October). Because the New Year ushers in a 10-day period of self-examination and penitence, Rosh Hashana is also called the annual Day of Judgment; during this period each Jew reviews his relationship with God, the Supreme Judge. A distinctive feature of the liturgy is the blowing of the ram’s horn (shofar) as prescribed in Numbers 29:1; the notes of the shofar call the Jewish people to a spiritual awakening associated with the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. During the Additional Service in the synagogue, the shofar is sounded after the recital of each of three groups of prayers. Rosh Hashana is observed Monday, September 26, 2022. Rosh Hashana is also known as the Day of Remembrance, for on this day Jews commemorate the creation of the world, and the Jewish nation recalls its responsibilities as God’s chosen people. 

On the first night of Rosh Hashana a New Year’s custom dictates that delicacies be prepared as omens of good luck. On the following night bread and fruit, dipped in honey, are customarily eaten, and a special blessing is recited. Rosh Hashana is the only festival observed for two days in Israel. 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 

Yet more on the origin of life's antiDarwinian bias.

Origin of the First Self-Replicating Molecules 

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 sixth 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.   

In an undergraduate seminar taught by Stanley Miller that I (Casey Luskin) took as a student at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Miller taught us that “making compounds and making life are two different things.”1 Many variants of Stanley Miller’s experimental setup have been used in attempting to demonstrate the conversion of energy-rich, gaseous-phase chemicals into amino acids and other biomolecular monomers. But this is not nearly sufficient to generate life. Any origin-of-life explanation must include plausible biochemical paths from individual bio-building blocks like amino acids or nucleic acids to functional polymers such as proteins and DNA. The origin-of-life explanation must also include ways to speed up chemical reactions that are naturally slow. In living cells, long chains of amino acids fold up into 3-D structures that allow them to function as enzymes that greatly accelerate chemical reactions, as seen in the figure below. How could these arise before life existed? More importantly, any origin-of-life model must account for the very particular sequencing of the molecules — i.e., the ordering of amino acids in proteins and nucleotide bases in RNA and DNA that allows them to function properly. This means explaining a crucial aspect of life: the origin of its information, or what proponents of intelligent design (ID) call the “information sequence problem.” 

The Most Popular Proposal  

For some theorists, the origin of life is defined as the natural origin of a self-replicating system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.2 The most popular proposal for the first self-replicating molecule is RNA — where life was first based upon RNA carrying both genetic information (akin to modern DNA) and performing catalytic functions (akin to modern enyzmes), in what is termed the RNA world. Before we delve deeply into that, it is instructive to use the proceedings of a conference organized by the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986 to measure the progress that has been made in origin-of-life research from 1952-1986. 

I (Walter Bradley) attended this conference and watched one of the plenary sessions devoted to a spirited debate between scientists who believed that the first life was made of DNA (“DNA-first”) and those who believed that the first biomolecules were proteins (“protein-first”). Neither group had yet been able to synthesize under plausible conditions either protein or DNA. Proteins can act as a chemical catalyst. DNA is the repository of information that is used to make functional protein. One of the outcomes from the conference was the sense that neither protein-first nor DNA-first were promising pathways to explaining the origin of life. But the difficulty demonstrating a plausible biochemical pathway for the origin of life that went through DNA-first or protein-first created an openness to new alternative possibilities. In 1986, the RNA world was just emerging as a popular alternative to protein-first or DNA-first models.

At the concluding plenary session, leading origin-of-life researcher Robert Shapiro addressed the RNA world and traced citations in the biochemical literature of the synthesis of RNA molecules under conditions thought to represent the early Earth conditions. The results were shocking. He cited a 1986 paper indicating RNA synthesis under prebiotic conditions had been demonstrated repeatedly, citing a 1985 paper and alluding to others. But that 1985 paper did not present original work — rather, it cited a 1984 paper and went all the way back to 1968 without any original work cited. A close reading of the 1968 paper indicated that the authors thought that they might have synthesized RNA molecules under prebiotic conditions but had not actually found any.  

Five Huge Barriers 

Shapiro’s talk subsequently presented five huge barriers to this biochemical pathway from prebiotic chemistry to the first living systems. At the end of his dramatic presentation, the room of most of the world’s most active origin-of-life researchers fell silent. The chair of the session, who was also the editor of the premiere journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, repeatedly invited questions from the stunned audience. It was the only time in my (Walter Bradley) professional lifetime that I attended a plenary session of scientists and engineers where there were no questions. The chair closed the session without any questions offered, and he closed with the comment, “Robert, do you have to be so pessimistic?” Robert did not reply, but might have said he was letting the data do the talking, and the data told a very pessimistic story. 

History has confirmed Shapiro’s pessimism. Despite these difficulties, to this day, the RNA world remains the most popular model for the origin of life. But there are major problems with the RNA world hypothesis and claims that a self-replicating RNA molecule appeared by pure chance. 

First, RNA has not been shown to assemble in a laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Origin-of-life theorist Steven Benner explained that a major obstacle to the natural production of RNA is that “RNA requires water to function, but RNA cannot emerge in water, and does not persist in water without repair” due to water’s “rapid and irreversible” corrosive effects upon RNA.3 In this “water paradox,” Benner explains that “life seems to need a substance (water) that is inherently toxic to polymers (e.g., RNA) necessary for life.”4

To overcome such difficulties, Benner and other chemists carefully designed experimental conditions that are favorable to the production of RNA. But Robert Shapiro explains that these experiments do not simulate natural conditions: “The flaw is in the logic — that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth.”5 Reviewing attempts to construct RNA in the lab, James Tour likewise found that “[t]he conditions they used were cleverly selected,” but in the natural world, “the controlled conditions required to generate” RNA are “painfully improbable.”6 Origin-of-life theorists Michael Robertson  and Gerald Joyce even called the natural origin of RNA a “Prebiotic Chemist’s Nightmare” because of “the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth.”7 In the end, these experiments demonstrate one thing: RNA can only form by intelligent design. 

A Second Problem 

Today, RNA is capable of carrying genetic information, but RNA world advocates claim that in the past, it also fulfilled the kinds of catalytic roles that enzymes perform today. A second problem with the RNA world is that RNA molecules do not exhibit many of the properties that allow proteins to serve as worker molecules in the cell. While RNA has been shown to perform a few roles, there is no evidence that it could perform all necessary cellular functions.8 As one paper put it, proteins are “one million times fitter than RNA as catalysts” and “[t]he catalytic repertoire of RNA is too limited.”9 

The Origin of Information 

The most fundamental problem with the RNA world hypothesis is its inability to explain the origin of information in the first self-replicating RNA molecule — which experts suggest would have had to be at least 100 nucleotides long, if not between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.10 How did the nucleotide bases in RNA become properly ordered to produce life? There are no known chemical or physical laws that can do this. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, origin-of-life theorists have no explanation other than blind chance. As noted, ID theorists call this obstacle the information sequence problem, but multiple mainstream theorists have also observed the great unlikelihood of naturally producing a precise RNA sequence required for replication. Shapiro puts the problem this way: 

A profound difficulty exists, however, with the idea of RNA, or any other replicator, at the start of life. Existing replicators can serve as templates for the synthesis of additional copies of themselves, but this device cannot be used for the preparation of the very first such molecule, which must arise spontaneously from an unorganized mixture. The formation of an information-bearing homo-polymer through undirected chemical synthesis appears very improbable.11 

Elsewhere, Shapiro notes, “The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable” with a probability that “is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.”12 A 2020 paper in Scientific Reports similarly notes, “Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life” because “the formation of such a long polymer having a correct nucleotide sequence by random reactions seems statistically unlikely.”13 Steven Benner refers to the “Information-Need Paradox,” where self-replicating RNA molecules would be “too long to have arisen spontaneously” from available building blocks.14 Benner raises an additional logical difficulty in that generating an RNA molecule capable of catalyzing its own replication is much less likely than generating RNA molecules that catalyze the destruction of RNA. This suggest a grave theoretical difficulty where RNA world theorists are faced with a “chemical theory that makes destruction, not biology, the natural outcome.”15 

An Intractable Problem 

The paper in Scientific Reports proposed a solution to these quandaries that showed just how intractable this problem is: It concluded that because the formation of a single self-replicating RNA molecule is prohibitively unlikely in the observable universe, and therefore the universe must be far larger than we observe — an “inflationary universe” that increases the probabilistic resources until such an unlikely event becomes likely. This is just like the materialist response to the fine-tuning of physics: When the observed specificity of nature appears to indicate design, they invent multiverses to overcome probabilistic difficulties. When RNA world theorists are appealing to the origin-of-life’s version of the multiverse to avoid falsification, it’s clear that their project has fatal problems.  

Notes 

1)Statements made by Stanley Miller at a talk given by him for a UCSD Origins of Life seminar class on January 19, 1999 (the talk was attended and notated by the author of this article).

2)Steven A. Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life,” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 44 (2014), 339-343.

3)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

4)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

5)Robert Shapiro, quoted in Richard Van Noorden, “RNA world easier to make,” Nature News (May 13, 2009), http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.471.html (accessed November 18, 2020).

6)James Tour, “Are Present Proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?,” Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, eds. Edited by J.P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 165-191.

7)Michael P. Robertson and Gerald F. Joyce, “The Origins of the RNA World,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 4 (May 2012), a003608.

8)See Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 304.

9)Harold S Bernhardt, “The RNA world hypothesis: the worst theory of the early evolution of life (except for all the others),” Biology Direct 7 (2012), 23.

10)Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel, and P. Luigi Luisi, “Synthesizing Life,” Nature, 409 (January 18, 2001), 387-390; 10)Tomonori Totani, “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe,” Scientific Reports 10 (2020), 1671.

11)Robert Shapiro, “A Replicator Was Not Involved in the Origin of Life,” IUBMB Life 49 (2000), 173-176.

12)Robert Shapiro, “A Simpler Origin for Life,” Scientific American (June 2007), 46-53.

13)Totani, “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe.”

14)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

15)Benner, “Paradoxes in the Origin of Life.”

 

Charles Darwin, back to the future?

 Listen: Darwin Returns from the Future 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear the concluding episode of I, Charles Darwin, in which author Nickell John Romjue’s time-traveling Darwin returns to his family home and offers some final reflections on his eye-opening visit to the 21st century. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Part 1 of the audio series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com 

What does the origin of life have to do with Darwinism?

It has become obvious to many, present company included, that Darwinism is less about explaining the origins of anything,and more about explaining away the technology manifest in living systems. That being the case the origin of life is very relevant . Being prebiotic, the origin of life is by definition pre Darwinian ,thus if the technology that Darwinists are attempting to explain away via their theory precedes Darwinian evolution that would certainly constitute a fail. 

Why no rise of the machines.

 New from Science Uprising — Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, and the Human Difference 

David Klinghoffer 

The latest Science Uprising episode is out and what it has to say is important. From the late Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, some of the smartest people on Earth have issued warnings about the looming danger posed by artificial intelligence. Not only is AI an amazing technology, they say, with the potential for uses both good and bad, but it threatens to replace and destroy humanity. The media love this particular concept and continually seek to scare us with it. Why?

The episode calls out the idea for what it is: applied materialism. Materialism is the denial of a spiritual reality. It animates Darwinian thinking, and it drives the panic about AI. After all, if humans are no more than “meat machines,” then a superior machine, equipped with AI, could well choose to do away with us. However, as four notable scholars explain here, AI runs on algorithms, which are essentially a recipe. AI does only what it’s programmed to do. Humans transcend algorithms. We do things that computers will never be able to accomplish: 

An Unexpected Gift 

Interviewed for the episode, Robert J. Marks, John Lennox, Jay Richards, and Selmer Bringsjord have profound things to teach. Dr. Marks, for example, is a renowned computer engineer at Baylor University who directs Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. He says that by its nature, AI is locked in a silo or box where it exercises its ability to run algorithms. Creativity, not mere copying or following commands, entails thinking “outside the box.” That’s how it can surprise us with genuine novelty. It’s why new ideas often come to us from out of the blue: not summoned but given as an unexpected gift.

This, too, may be why artists notoriously live disordered lives, and why totalitarian societies are typically poor in art (as distinct from kitsch or propaganda) and in creativity generally. The regimentation is not compatible with giving free rein to the human difference. It’s something to think about as rule by authoritarian experts becomes more and more the expectation in our own culture. Young people especially need to understand this. Watch the new Science Uprising now and share it

The OOL'S antiDarwinian bias continued.

 The “Clumping” Problem and 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 fifth 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. 

Assuming that prebiotic organic polymers could be created under some set of natural conditions, the origin of life still cannot occur unless the requisite molecules can be concentrated or “clumped” together in some protective container where necessary chemical reactions can take place. In living organisms, such environments are the basic unit of life — the cell. But could something like a cell membrane arise naturally before life existed? 

In the 1970s, biochemist Sidney Fox and colleagues believed they had uncovered primitive cell membrane-like structures called protenoid microspheres.1 Other structures called coacervates were proposed, first by Oparin, as potential precursors to modern cell membranes.2 Because these structures lack any metabolism and the ability to self-reproduce,3they clearly could not constitute life. But even if these structures could do those things, they are unable to perform the most basic protective function of cell membranes: discriminate among nutrients, waste products, and toxic chemicals. 

Campbell’s Biology, a prominent college-level biology textbook, explains this requirement: 

One of the earliest episodes in the evolution of life may have been the formation of a membrane that enclosed a solution different from the surrounding solution while still permitting the uptake of nutrients and elimination of waste products. The ability of the cell to discriminate in its chemical exchanges with its environment is fundamental to life, and it is the plasma membrane and its component molecules that make this selectivity possible.4 

A Smart, Active Gatekeeper 

Undoubtedly the textbook is correct: Without this extremely important protective barrier, the earliest forms of life would be unable to obtain food and be vulnerable to harmful molecules and chemical reactions in the outside environment, such as oxidation. The membrane also keeps the cell’s components together to allow for necessary cellular processes to take place. But the “lipid bilayer” of modern cells is no mere passive wall — it’s a smart, active gatekeeper capable of allowing water and nutrients in, and letting waste products out. Specialized machines embedded in this smart membrane discriminate between helpful and harmful substances through a variety of biochemical pathways and molecular pumps. Hence the problem for origin-of-life theorists — as synthetic chemist James Tour of Rice University explains, no origin-of-life experiments have ever created “the required passive transport sites and active pumps for the passage of ions and molecules through bilayer membranes.”5 

Daunting Complexity 

Tour elaborates on the daunting complexity of cell membranes that remains unexplained by origin-of-life theorists:

Researchers have identified thousands of different lipid structures in modern cell membranes. These include glycerolipids, sphingolipids, sterols, prenols, saccharolipids, and polyketides. For this reason, selecting the bilayer composition for our synthetic membrane target is far from straightforward. When making synthetic vesicles — synthetic lipid bilayer membranes — mixtures of lipids can, it should be noted, destabilize the system.

Lipid bilayers surround subcellular organelles, such as nuclei and mitochondria, which are themselves nanosystems and microsystems. Each of these has their own lipid composition.

Lipids have a nonsymmetric distribution. The outer and inner faces of the lipid bilayer are chemically inequivalent and cannot be interchanged.6

Despite modest progress with the synthetic production of microspheres, coacervates, and similar structures, the lack of any discrimination ability means the clumping step in the origin of life has not been explained. 

Notes 

1)sidney W. Fox, John R. Jungck, and Tadayoshi Nakashima, “From Protenoic Microsphere to Contemporary Cell: Formation of Internucleotide and Peptide Bonds by Protenoid Particles,” Origins of Life 5 (1974), 227-237. 

2)Emanuele Astoricchio, Caterina Alfano, Lawrence Rajendran, Piero Andrea Temussi, and Annalisa Pastore, “The Wide World of Coacervates: From the Sea to Neurodegeneration,” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 45 (August 2020), 706-717.

3)Zhu Hua, “On the Origin of Life: A Possible Way from Fox’s Microspheres into Primitive Life,” Symbiosis 4 (2018), 1-7.

4)Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman, Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson, Cambell’s Biology, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2011), 125.

5)James Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Inference Review: International Review of Science 3 (2017), 2.

6)Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues.”

Science is catching up with God?

Meyer: Webb Telescope Confirms a Cosmic Beginning

David Klinghoffer 

One of the three pillars of Stephen Meyer’s “God Hypothesis” argument is the fact that the universe had a beginning a finite time ago. Or is it a fact? A physics researcher, Eric Lerner, won himself some big media time recently with the claim that images from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were casting serious doubt on the Big Bang. The images showed far too many fully formed galaxies too soon after the universe began, according to the Big Bang theory. Did this hint that the universe, in fact, had no beginning, at least as we understand that?

Writing at The Daily Wire, Dr. Meyer examines Lerner’s case and explains what’s wrong with it. The question has to do with red-shifted (i.e., stretched out) radiation and so-called “tired light.” 

If the JWST were to detect “uber” red shifted radiation coming from extremely ancient, distant galaxies, that would provide additional confirmation that the universe has expanded as much as the Big Bang theory predicts. 

So has the JWST detected such radiation? It has. In fact, there would be no extremely distant galaxies to analyze had the JWST not detected long wavelength infrared radiation coming from them. Remember the JWST was specifically designed to detect such infrared radiation. Thus, the fact that it has been able to produce images of extremely distant galaxies shows that it has collected the kind of radiation astronomers would expect if the universe is expanding as the Big Bang theory affirms. 

Lerner mentions none of this. Instead, he highlights surprising discoveries about how many galaxies had formed in those remote periods in cosmic history. He argues that, given current theory, we should not expect to see so many galaxies so early. 

Perhaps. But the evidence he cites challenges models of galaxy formation, not an expanding universe or the Big Bang. 

Interestingly, Lerner acknowledges that the JWST has detected extremely red-shifted radiation. But he explains this away with something called the “tired-light hypothesis.” He acknowledges that wavelengths increase with distance but denies the expansion of space produces that elongation. Instead, he asserts light stretches out as it loses energy in transit. 

Yet the tired-light hypothesis has been discredited. No known mechanism degrades the energy of a photon of light without changing its direction and momentum. But any such change would cause images of the object emitting the photon to blur. That blurring has not been observed. 

Lerner’s arguments have also been rejected because of other astronomical evidence — the observed abundance of light elements and the famed “Cosmic Background ” — that the Big Bang model explains uniquely well. 

“In the Beginning…”

In Return of the Hypothesis, Meyer recounts why scientists, even Einstein, resisted the Big Bang as it was formulated initially by Georges Lemaître. The philosophical stakes were just too enormous. Materialism could not accept so massive a confirmation of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning…”

Because of this, even as Lerner’s bid for publicity will be a thing of the past soon enough, you can be sure that an atmosphere of nervousness about cosmology and what it teaches will persist. Just in the past month, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asked, “Did the Big Bang happen?” (Her answer: We can’t know how the universe originated, if it did.) And Scientific American proclaimed, without a mention of Lerner, “JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology.” These are challenges that are NOT going away. 

 

Yet another rant against post millenialism

 Luke18:8KJV"I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"  

A balanced consideration of this text would certainly not leave a fair minded truthseeker with the impression that our Lord expected to find (true) Christianity having gained universal(or even widespread)  acceptance upon his return.

Revelation3:9KJV"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. " 

So rather than being rendered impotent during the church's time on earth , Satan retains rulership over the Government's of this age . This fact test the ( true) church "10 days" i.e the entirety of the end times. Doesn't sound very post millenialist to me. 

Revelation16:8,9KJV"8And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. 9And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory." 

Again our Lord puts true Christians on notice that in this present age there will never be any heeding of the warning that JEHOVAH is giving through his loyalists, bible truth and those promulgating it will continue to be treated with contempt until the Lord JEHOVAH reasserts his rightful sovereignty over this planet. 

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.