Abiogenesis - Or Better Living Through Chemistry

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John Paul: Life isn't just about chemical reactions. How long is it going to take before you realize that?

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Quetzal: It most assuredly IS about chemical reactions. When will YOU realize that?

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Life isn't just about chemical reactions; for example, it's also about information processing.

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Rei: there are countless possibilities (I could equally, say, go into the SunY self-replicator, the hexanucleotide self-replicator, Eckland's RNA polymerase self replicator, etc).

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/*DNAunion*/ But since you have asserted as fact that the SunY ribozyme and Eckland's RNA polymerase are self-replicators, you have a position to back up. So you now need to post quotes from the papers for the experiments that show those molecules actually self-replicate.

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Rei, do you ever intend to support your assertion?

And how is that information processed? Is there any chemistry involved in a synapse?

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Rrhain: You claim that X is not seen. When shown an example of X, you then claim that it isn't an example of Y and hope to high heaven that nobody notices that you didn't ask for Y in the first place.

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DNAunion: Now who’s playing games! Why the use of variables instead of actual words? So tell us, exactly what did I claim is not seen? Exactly what example of that did you present? Exactly what did I supposedly change the requirement into in order to avoid being shown to be wrong?

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Rrhain, do you ever intend to support your assertion? Or should we all just conclude you were being dishonest?

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And how is that information processed? Is there any chemistry involved in a synapse?

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Synapses? As in neuronal connections? What do they have to do with the origin of life? Or are you a closet IDist? :-)Information in the biological sense I was using involves symbol sequences, such as base sequences in nucleic acids. These symbol sequences serve as an informational template for the production of "offspring" (and in cellular life, for the production of cellular constituents). It is not just the chemistry of the monomers that conveys the information; the sequence of the monomers is of paramount importance. This can be likened to the English language where individual letters are analogous to individual monomers. It is not that an individual letter of the alphabet carries inherent meaning, but a group of them arranged in a specific sequence does. For example, if I took all of the letters in this sentence or post and scrambled them up, the information (both syntactic and semantic) would be lost, even though the same "monomers" would be present in the same quantities.No experiment to date has demonstrated that undirected, non-biological chemistry alone can generate biological information of the kind needed for a "simple" RNA self-replicator. There is more to life than just chemistry; there is also information processing.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-29-2003]

Hmmm, I guess I'll have to ask again.

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Rei: there are countless possibilities (I could equally, say, go into the SunY self-replicator, the hexanucleotide self-replicator, Eckland's RNA polymerase self replicator, etc).

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/*DNAunion*/ But since you have asserted as fact that the SunY ribozyme and Eckland's RNA polymerase are self-replicators, you have a position to back up. So you now need to post quotes from the papers for the experiments that show those molecules actually self-replicate.

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Rei, do you ever intend to support your assertion?

http://EvC Forum: Excellent paper-peptide self assembly------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

I fail to see how that supports your assertions in the least.

Great opening article - see Message 1 by Quetzal (who has not posted for a while, sad to say).Should be a good place to take up any new discussion of abiogenesis.Enjoy.

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