Comments

  1. Eli says

    The science of it is fascinating.Hopefully it will help some more people understand just what evolution is.

  2. Coffeeassured says

    I’m afraid I am guilty of just listening to the music, possibly because I have studied too much biology.

  3. speedwell says

    Loved it. It was new to me, too.

    Just one quibble… randomness is supposed to represent more information that organization, right? Someone good at information theory please help me out here?

  4. Nerdette says

    This may give away my age, but I can’t help it: That was damn cool. Being stuck in a lab for the majority of my college career, I can only image what sort of rigorous and painful investigation Jack Szostak took. Wow, just, wow.

  5. says

    I loved how it confirmed that biology is just glorified chemistry. :P

    I don’t know where this guy intends on going with the origins of morality, it’s rather ambitious. I find that sort of thing tends to break down considerably when people try to apply it to current ethno-cultural norms. We’ll see.

  6. says

    MAJeff: oh yes. Singing in the chorus of Beethoven’s Choral (and Handel’s Messiah) are two of the great free joys in life.

    The second movement of the Choral Symphony is better than the fourth, though.

  7. Fernando Magyar says

    But, but, you mean Thor may have had nothing to do with creation by heaving thunderbolts at mud puddles? Well that’s a good story and all but you still can’t explain the imortal soul thingy now can you Mr Smarty Pants? And let’s not even start about morality etc, etc…

    OT, saw this movie today, I have long suspected that human beings are too stupid, greedy and delusional to survive. This just pushes me a little further along in that belief! Let’s just all party like there is no tomorrow! Cause it sure looks like there ain’t going to be one. Ironically I actually went diving this morning and my girlfriend saw her first shark in the wild and she was thrilled. Then I ruined it all by taking her to see this. http://www.sharkwater.com/

  8. says

    Watching it again. It really is gorgeous.

    What does it say about us, the only result of this process we really know, that the knowledge contained here replicates so poorly in comparison with the pseudo-knowledge that is religion? Perhaps the answer lies in invalidating the question: that which is us, at the level of what replicates, eats, and evolves, doesn’t give a damn about holy books and prophets. It simply is.

    That’s enough to paint beauty into my world.

  9. says

    speedwell:

    Just one quibble… randomness is supposed to represent more information that organization, right? Someone good at information theory please help me out here?

    Well, we have to define what we mean by “information” and “organization”, first. A standard way of talking about this stuff is Kolmogorov complexity, which (speaking informally) is the size of the smallest program which outputs the thing you’re trying to describe the complexity of. A DNA sequence one thousand adenines long would be rather boring, but easy to describe (I just did). A sequence which has no pattern admits no description shorter than itself, and thus has maximal Kolmogorov complexity.

    On the other hand, you could take Shannon’s perspective, in which information describes properties of probability distributions. In flipping a fair coin, we have no reason to expect either heads or tails to be favored, so we assign equal weight to each possibility, saying that each outcome has probability 1/2. Likewise for an honest die: not having any reason to expect one outcome to be favored, we assign probability 1/6 to each of the 6 outcomes. These are situations of maximum uncertainty: we really have no idea which side of the die will turn up, only that one of them must. If we tried to communicate the result of the die roll to somebody else, then we couldn’t pull any clever tricks. In Morse code, for example, common letters get shorter representations, so a typical message will take fewer dashes and dots.

    Now, suppose that the die is loaded, and one particular side — let’s say the side marked 1 — comes up half the time. The probability of side 1 turning up, which we could denote P(1), is 0.5, while all the other probabilities add up to make the remaining 0.5 (the sum of all probabilities always has to be 100%). If this were the case, we could use fewer “dashes and dots” to transmit the outcome, say by using a single dot to denote face 1, so that half the time, our message consists only of a single dot. The Shannon information of a probability distribution is a measure of how well messages whose characters are chosen at random from that distribution can be squeezed by well-chosen coding.

    All measures of information satisfy some basic properties; different definitions are applicable to different biological topics. Punch “Shannon information” into the “Search this blog” gizmo and you might find something useful.

  10. says

    [R]andomness is supposed to represent more information that organization, right?

    Not at all. The best definition of information I have ever seen is “that which you do not expect to see”. Randomness is rather the norm, and noise is recognizable as such. Adding randomness to systems which can adapt, if they are robust enough, is a driver for evolution.

  11. genesgalore says

    given a couple of billion years and a planet as hospitable of earth, energy finds a way to complexly flow. as buzz lightyear might say: “to phosolipids and beyond”

  12. John Morales says

    I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if all the claims in the video are factual, but it doesn’t seem implausible otherwise.

    Speedwell, there is a difference between information and data.

    See Wikipedia, in particular the paragraph just prior to the link.

  13. says

    I may display a bit of my own ignorance, but I really don’t think that abiogenesis and evolution can be separated. From my (casual) reading, I think the process of evolution and natural selection is the key to understanding the origin of life.

    I think also that the idea of a singular abiogenesis is misleading, as proteins and enzymes in precursors copied by RNA and possibly PNA would have to have been well-established by the time that the fits and starts from which the early life sprung.

    Obviously, a great deal of research into abiogenesis is being done and we will approach the process with greater understanding. I just think it misleading to state that evolution and abiogenesis are not related. Evolution can explain the origins of life.

  14. says

    Figuring out how life came to be is going to be a long haul–we’re talking about events that took place 4 billion years ago in an environment vastly different than anything on Earth today. Researchers who attempt to duplicate these primitive conditions have to be mighty careful to exclude modern microbes since the earliest life forms or prelife forms might have been able to compete with one another but would simply be lunch for a modern germ. Then, all you had to do was outrun the other camper. Now you’ve got to out run the bear.

    Under the circumstances, I think it would be a good idea to point out that Szostak’s scheme is extremely speculative, more a proof of concept than a worked out theory.

    By the way, if memory serves, the Soviet scientist Oparin was the first guy to make a big deal about the ability of lipids to spontaneously form vesicles. Nobody ever gives this guy any credit. Admittedly his writings make pretty peculiar reading now with all their gestures towards Engels and dialectical materialism, but he really was ahead of his time. His major book appeared in 1924!

  15. says

    The odd thing about this video is that it starts off by saying “Evolution is completely different from abiogenesis” (the standard line), but by the end, it’s demonstrating that physical and chemical interactions in simple phospholipid systems can yield differential survival of randomly varying replicators. In other words, general principles of evolution are applicable to stuff simpler than any extant living cell, stuff we would still label an “origin of life” affair. Didn’t we have an argument a while back about the validity of that “evolution ain’t abiogenesis” meme?

  16. Strakh says

    A wasted argument.
    The last line proves this so:
    “Think about it.”
    If religidiots thought, there would be no reason for the video.
    Beautiful, though.
    From beginning to end…

  17. says

    Interesting video indeed. Except that there is a little clumsiness when it answers the first creationist argument (that spontaneous generation is impossible): the video just confirms what creationists say! They should have answered that spontaneous generation is about life appearing is some hours or days. In abiogenesis, it appears is thousands or millions years.

    Another very interesting site is Exploring Origins and, in particular, the video of how protocells replicate.

    In the chicken/egg problem, i.e. DNA/protein problem (you need DNA to make proteins, you need proteins to duplicate DNA), the solution is probably RNA which can act either as DNA (recordering genetic information) or as protein. The DNA and protein molecules probably appear later, to improve and accelerate the system by natural selection.

  18. anonymouse says

    Ah, abiogenesis research, you splendid fount of wild speculation. One thing that may help this field, is finding some very simple, naturally occurring replicators. Perhaps here on Earth, or perhaps on another part of the solar system.

  19. Goffer says

    Good luck finding these replicators here on earth now… I’d assume they’ve all been devoured by higher orders of life billions of years ago. The only way that these would be able to be observed is in the lab / on a planet where life is just beginning.

  20. says

    The solution might not be RNA either, according to Szostak, but a different nucleic acid polymer that could self-polymerize more easily. There were likely several iterations of different molecules until RNA appeared. What I find to be the genius stroke is the use of ingredients that today would not work at all (leaky membranes, highly reactive nucleotides, etc) – but back then were exactly what was required.

    The one issue I had with Szostak’s work is what I would call a human time bias: in the talk that I saw, he showed one kind of nucleotide spontaneously polymerized a few bases per week, which they didn’t like, so they synthesized different kinds of nucleotides until they found one that polymerized at a rate of tens of bases overnight. That might help the experiments go faster, which is nice if you’re the one doing them, but who’s to say that the historical abiogenesis events didn’t take months to polymerize a single base?

  21. speedwell says

    Thanks, everyone. This is what the Internet should be… someone calls, and someone answers. Hooray!

    Time to go study…

  22. says

    Yes: it’s true that for some definitions of information, adding a random character at the end of a string constitutes an increase in information. But the real question is just whether that’s really what you wanted to know in the first place.

    And while abiogenesis and evolution are indeed two different sorts of theories, saying that they are completely different is just silly. There’s quite likely to be a lot of processes in common, all sort of depending on how you define “life” and hence where you put the dividing line.

  23. Andrew says

    I hate it when videos like this don’t bother to credit the music they use, as if a whole bunch of people didn’t spend their entire lives studying to create the recording that’s glibly used as background music.

  24. says

    @ anonymouse #17 …

    Ah, abiogenesis research, you splendid fount of wild speculation. One thing that may help this field, is finding some very simple, naturally occurring replicators. Perhaps here on Earth, or perhaps on another part of the solar system.

    The Imperial College London released some new information today! Raw materials necessary for RNA and DNA molecules came from meteorites.

  25. says

    Another great video from cdk007. I fear he may be asking a bit too much of the cdesign proponentists at the end of the video, though…”think about it”? Heh…

  26. web says

    @ speedwell

    You are correct. In the Shannon sense, “entropy is information” (though this quote is from the also famous Norbert Wiener), so yes, disorder increases information. A crystal lattice of billions of atoms takes less information to describe fully than does an amorphous blob of glass, which is non-crystalline. Other commenter’s attempts to dissuade you should be ignored. Shannon wasn’t all about probability distributions.

    What one needs to do is examine the amount of information it takes to describe the state of something; a system, or whatever. Highly ordered things take less information to describe. It’s not difficult.

    If one is familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, you will know that in any system through there is a flux of matter and energy, the system will “self-organize” to dissipate the energy. He won the Nobel for work in this area in 1977, but few people seem to know of it. Our biosphere is such a place where there is a constant flux of matter and energy.

    There are a lot of smart people commenting here, but getting Shannon and “information” screwed up is inexcusable.

  27. Nicole says

    I can’t help but think, what small changes in the environment in these early crucial stages would make things just slightly different such that billions of years later, on some other planet, how very different that life might be like. Fascinating!

  28. boomer says

    Wow… the elegance and simplicity of the mechanisms of the origin of life outlined in the video is jaw-dropping. The music is equally as inspiring, I had forgotten how much I loved Beethoven.

    MAJeff, thank you for posting the video of Bernstein… what a spectacular performance! I’d love to experience something like this in person some day – are there any suggestions from classical music fans about where I should see a live performance, I don’t get too much culture where I live but I’m willing to travel anywhere in North America to see something like this.

  29. T-1000 says

    That was an insanely cool video. It’s just so simple. Has anyone made a working protocell yet? Now if I could only get my macroscale self-replicator working(help would be appreciated): http://www.reprap.org

  30. themadlolscientist says

    Peter Mc and MAJeff, you’re breakin’ my heart! I used to be a pro choral singer until I got hijacked out to the outer fringes of the universe where the opportunities are nonexistent. I sang plenty of Messiah, but never got the chance to sing Beethoven 9. :-(

    cdk007 is terrific!

  31. says

    Great video!

    Can someone please direct me to some information about the nucleic acids other than DNA, RNA and PNA? Do they still occur naturally (abiotically), or are they quickly devoured by microbes, so they are produced synthetically?

    Thanks.

  32. travc says

    A bit of a nitpick. The theory of evolution does even try to explain abiogenisis, true enough. BUT, the theory of evolution makes the problem of abiogenisis much much easier. When we know that evolution can kick in and, well, evolve pretty much anything which has heritable variation exposed to selection… well abiogenisis just has to explain how to get something with heritable variation exposed to selection. Much easier than explaining the first cell or ‘organism’.

  33. travc says

    Information, organization, and complexity trip up a lot of people, but this should not be so. With respect to biology, it really is quite simple.

    First off, forget all the engineering, thermodynamics, and computer science / communications theory stuff. The vast majority of that stuff is about very particular systems (like an ideal gas or a communication channel) and includes many implicit assumptions.

    Now, getting to the basics. What we are talking about is always the ‘state’ an object of population of objects are in.

    Uncertainty is just the uncertainty about what state something is in.

    Information is how much the uncertainty about the state of A is reduced by knowing the state of B. Information is always about one thing with respect to another thing… it has no meaning without the ‘with respect to’ part. A street map may have a lot of information with respect to the roads of a city, but has no information with respect to the surface of the moon.

    The information contained in the genome of organism which has relevance to evolution is with respect to fitness. From an evolution pov, information is all about survival and making offspring.

    Complexity is best avoided, but normally just means relative information content. A is more complex than B if A contains more information about C than B contains about C. Best just to stick to information IMO.

    Organization is a pretty fuzzy word. The term often gets used to mean how much information there is between two parts of a system… ie, if you know the state of one part, you have less uncertainty about the state of other parts. I don’t like this way of thinking about it very much. A better definition IMO is “how much better an ensemble of parts completes a goal than some subset of those parts”. ie, an organized system is one where the parts work together with respect to some defined goal.

    Sorry about the long pedantic comment, but I’ve literally written papers on this stuff and it is a pet peeve of mine.

    Tom Schneider has a pretty neat website all about Molecular Information Theory and the Theory of Molecular Machines which everyone curious about information theory in biology should read.

  34. says

    How could anyone be bored by science as cool as that!

    That was seriously the coolest thing I have ever seen, ever!

    This is video is definitely stuff that could be high school biology material.

  35. Peter Ashby says

    Hmmm, if he wasn’t so fixated on doing it with DNA, Szostak wouldn’t need his silly just so story of black smokers acting as pcr machines. Double stranded is way eaasier to unzip than DNA. Also his scheme says nothing about sequence conservation and selection. His growing vesicles are a competition for the most polymerised DNA, the sequence is irrelevant. Sorry, completely unconvinced.

    The RNA world however has molecules that can be both information store and catalyst. The video also ellides the issue of how you get protein (need complex protein machinery, apparently) when in fact ribosomes without protein components, just the RNA still work. They are very inefficient, and buggy, but they work, dammit it if I can find the reference though.

    Sorry, DNA is a Johnny come lately when it comes to abiogenesis.

  36. says

    I agree with others. The abiogenesis/evolution division is not helpful, and also RNA would have been a far better starting point than DNA. There has been recent work that shows RNA polymerization and some stages of enzyme-free replication work well in ice.

    Personally, I have a problem with the word “abiogenesis”. I think it shows that we still have a problem with an unconscious vitalist view of things. Life isn’t special – it is just chemistry and thermodynamics. There is no magic point when those processes become life, because life isn’t magic.

  37. David Marjanović, OM says

    OK, I’m off to the university to watch the video. Over here it still doesn’t work.

  38. Richard Harris says

    Jim Harrison @ # 18, Then, all you had to do was outrun the other camper. Now you’ve got to out run the bear.

    Not really. Outrunning the other camper will be quite sufficient. ;¬))

    But I agree with your point, because there’d have been lots of metaphorical ‘bears’.

  39. BaldApe says

    David R:

    What the video said is that spontaneous generation of complex life is impossible. That is what the creationists are usually arguing against, that even the simplest cells today are impossible to generate from nonliving precursors at random. He shows that that is an irrelevant argument; that the earliest replicators could have been so simple that they could have been spontaneously generated.

    And Steve Zara:
    I agree that there is a problem with unconscious vitalizm, but I see this particular issue as similar to the problem of when a new species can be said to have come into existence.

    There is no individual that can be said to be the “first” member of a new species. There is a sequence of populations that very gradually go from being one species to being another species.

    Similarly, there are a bunch of undeniably nonliving molecules, then some replicators that are something short of “alive,” then eventually, something that just about everybody would agree is alive. Just because you can’t draw a sharp dividing line between living and nonliving doesn’t make the difference entirely trivial.

  40. MAJeff, OM says

    MAJeff, thank you for posting the video of Bernstein… what a spectacular performance! I’d love to experience something like this in person some day – are there any suggestions from classical music fans about where I should see a live performance, I don’t get too much culture where I live but I’m willing to travel anywhere in North America to see something like this.

    We’ve got a pretty good hall and symphony here in Boston. My favorite place–because of the acoustics, the house orchestra, and a special personal experience–is the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Prolly not really a good value at the moment.

    But honestly, find anything. Pretty much every mid-size city and above has a professional orchestra. Not everyone is Lenny, but there’s a lot of wonderful music out there. Even a student recital at the local music school can be incredibly moving.

  41. Nick Gotts says

    Good stuff! I hadn’t come across Szostak’s work on abiogenesis, and I know far too little about the area to know whether it’s the most promising approach. My own hunch is that abiogenesis may have occurred in structurally complex non-living environments, where precursor chemicals could accumulate and a variety of catalysts could operate, rather than in the open ocean. Cairns-Smith’s ideas on clays as early replicators don’t seem to have led anywhere AFAIK, but I was quite taken with ideas that black smokers producing foamlike-structures of FeS could have been the site of abiogenesis:
    Martin, W. and Russell, M.J. (2002). On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 358:59-85.
    Koonin, E.V. and Martin, W. (2005). On the origin of genomes and cells within inorganic compartments. Trends in Genetics 21:649-654.

    In fact, given that there is at least one path to the production of simple life, there are probably many; I suspect that within a few decades at most, the debate will be about which of the (by then) many known ways it could have happened, actually took place on Earth.

  42. Lauren says

    Seems like an awful lot of speculation. Have we even SEEN any evidence of these early cells?

  43. says

    In regard to the video and the comment:

    “Personally, I have a problem with the word “abiogenesis”. I think it shows that we still have a problem with an unconscious vitalist view of things. Life isn’t special – it is just chemistry and thermodynamics. There is no magic point when those processes become life, because life isn’t magic.”

    Posted by: Steve Zara | June 16, 2008 4:19

    1. How ironic that the video opens with the claim that abiogenesis has NOTHING to do with evolution and then the remainder of it presents an elaborate fictional ‘recipe’ for how life evolved.

    2. We have NO problem with you guys believing in fiction, but we just request that you cease to teach it to unsuspecting children as it were factual.
    “The origins of the universe, our galaxy, and our solar system produced the conditions necessary for the evolution of life on Earth. While many questions remain about the origins of life on this planet, the appearance of life set in motion a process of biological evolution that continues to this day.”
    Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008)
    National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
    http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309105862&page=18

    3. Since evolutionists claim that ALL scientific theories must qualify as being naturalistic, why don’t you put a microscope on this video or all the other hypothetical evolutionary scenarios? After all, don’t you want to preserve the integrity of science education?
    http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/scientific_criteria.html
    http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/evolution_of_life.html

    4. Since Steve doesn’t think life is magic, why is it that scientists still can’t seems to create life in a laboratory? After all, it’s all so ‘simple’!

  44. Nick Gotts says

    wiyc@49. No-one said it was simple, you moronic liar. By the same token, I suppose you think the sun works by magic, since scientists have not yet produced continuous nuclear fusion in the laboratory?

  45. Richard Harris says

    Whoisyourcreator, “why is it that scientists still can’t seems to create life in a laboratory? After all, it’s all so ‘simple’!”

    Why can’t you god botherers understand the simple facts of the matter? It probably takes millions of years, & very many trillions of molecular interactions, to ‘accidentally’ bring about biological life. Life took millions of years to get established on the Earth. The conditions on the planet weren’t conducive to life for the first few hundred million years. After half a billion years, life was established. For the first 3.5 billion years of its existence, all it had evolved to was single-cell organisms.

    If your god-thing magicked life into existence, what was it feckin’ about at for all that time?

  46. says

    Thank you for your thought provoking comments.

    If you are ever able to back up your faith with empirical evidence, we might possibly engage in an actual debate. Until then, your juvenile insults are proof that you lack the confidence to prove your case.

  47. Dirk Diggler says

    There is a show on the History Channel tonight (Monday, June 16th) at 9pm Eastern called ‘How Life Began’. It sounds pretty good…

    http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=303042

    “Was life triggered by some event, like lightning hitting a pond full of amino acids? Earth was teeming with life billions of years before the dinosaurs existed. Single-celled organisms inundated the oceans, and the soil swarmed with living creatures. Where did it all come from and how do you go from a single-celled organism to a trillion-celled organism like Man? Cutting-edge science is testing out answers about life’s origins and how life can be created on new worlds–or even our own.”

  48. Nick Gotts says

    wiyc@52 “Moronic liar” was not an insult, just a factual description. If and when scientists do produce life in the laboratory, will you become an atheist? Actually, I can answer that question for myself – no, you will just say it is proof that only “intelligent design” can produce life.

  49. BaldApe says

    whoisyourcreator:

    Naturalistic explanations have been found for all of the things that used to be explained by fairies, spirits, naiads dryads and gods. Why should the origin of life be any different?

    Do you have any evidence that any supernatural being exists, and if it exists how it can affect matter?

  50. David Marjanović, OM says

    Seems like an awful lot of speculation. Have we even SEEN any evidence of these early cells?

    You have utterly missed the point of the video. That point is that the origin of life was probably inevitable because it was so easy.

    The video makes two assumptions: that there were lots of fatty acids in the ocean 4 billion years ago, and that there were lots of nucleotides in the same ocean.

    If these two assumptions are met, the processes shown in the video cannot help occurring! The weak point of the video is that it presupposes quite a bit of knowledge of biochemistry that you apparently don’t have.

    Now it’s your turn. Have we seen Epimetheus, the creator of animals?

    How ironic that the video opens with the claim that abiogenesis has NOTHING to do with evolution and then the remainder of it presents an elaborate fictional ‘recipe’ for how life evolved.

    Evolution only comes in during the last 1/3 of the video. “Evolution” means “descent with heritable modification”.

    We have NO problem with you guys believing in fiction, but we just request that you cease to teach it to unsuspecting children as it were factual.

    Nobody teaches this hypothesis as fact. The problem is that you don’t know what all those technical terms like “fact” and “hypothesis” mean. Go here to learn that.

    evolutionists claim that ALL scientific theories must qualify as being naturalistic,

    Science theory, my friend. Science means being able to answer the question “if I were wrong, how would I know?” all the way down. There are two ways to do this:

    – Falsification. Classical physics predicts that the elliptical orbit of Mercury is stable; in reality, the elliptical orbit of Mercury rotates around the sun; classical physics is (slightly) wrong. Whatever isn’t falsifiable isn’t science, because if it were wrong, we could never find that out.
    – Parsimony. This means that, of two or more hypotheses that are falsifiable and not so far falsified, the one that requires the fewest extra assumptions (like assumptions about previously unknown entities or processes) must be preferred. Classical physics says that two different sets of forces act if you move a magnet around a stationary conductor or if you move a conductor around a stationary magnet; the theory of special relativity says that it’s the same set of forces both times because the cases are in fact identical; relativity wins — provided that we don’t find the orbit of Mercury to be stable.

    Hypotheses that don’t limit themselves to natural causes are commonly not falsifiable (mysterious, after all, are the ways of the Lord), and without exception they fail the principle of parsimony (they need to assume a supernatural realm, containing a whole set of unknown forces and interactions, that the competition doesn’t need).

    Any more questions?

    why don’t you put a microscope on this video or all the other hypothetical evolutionary scenarios? After all, don’t you want to preserve the integrity of science education?

    Huh?

  51. David Marjanović, OM says

    Since Steve doesn’t think life is magic, why is it that scientists still can’t seems to create life in a laboratory? After all, it’s all so ‘simple’!

    It’s very simple if you have a sterile oxygen-free ocean and, say, half a billion years at your disposal. Duh.

    Incidentally, building viruses from scratch in the lab has been done, but the processes used there are not terribly similar to anything that can have happened on the early Earth.

  52. Jeph says

    What kind of creator builds a system of life that exists largely by destroying other life? An evil one, that’s who.

    Congratulations, wiyc@#49. You have converted me to Gnosticism. The God of Genesis is evil! Down with the Demiurge!

  53. Dennis N says

    From whoisyourcreator.com

    Examine for Yourself What is More Naturalistic:
    The Theory of Evolution or the Genesis Account of Creation?

    We know the answer, but why are those the only two choices? Knocking down evolution does not prop up Genesis. Genesis is widely inaccurate on just about everything. It’s genealogies, locations, events, time lines, are all either unverified, over glorified, or wrong. An entire website based on a false dichotomy. Why don’t you change it to:

    Examine for Yourself What is More Naturalistic:
    The Theory of Evolution or the Native American Account of Creation?

  54. N.Wells says

    Another great video by chk007. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

    To 19 & 38 re evolution vs abiogenesis:
    It is true that the more we learn about abiogenesis, the harder it will be to distinguish nearly-alive from just-qualifies-as-living, and the closer the precursors to natural selection and genes will grow to the ‘real thing’, as cdk’s video shows. Nonetheless, the modern Theory of Evolution works (in part) with reproduction and growth at minimum strongly influenced by genes, and genes and genetic-based reproduction aren’t fully present until you’ve got life, so abiogenesis is legitimately distinct from evolution, even if it shares some processes or simple versions of those processes with living organisms.

    Regardless, a full understanding of life will require an explanation of how it arose, so I think it is fair to claim that biology will not be complete until it has a Grand Unifying Theory that incorporates, explains, and unifies both evolution and abiogenesis.

  55. raven says

    Relax people, it is just another crazy dishonest creo. Movethegoalposts just makes stuff up. When they are proven to be lies, he runs away. Then makes up more lies.

    He claimed a week ago that no one ever saw gene duplication followed by mutation to acquire a novel function. The reality is that we have seen exactly that in real time. There is also another example, the nylonase gene arose by duplication and mutation (wikipedia).

    movethegoalposts:

    If you are claiming that research has been proven to show that gene duplication creates new functional genes that have NOT been previously found in an existing organism, please cite your paper.

    Otherwise, it’s just empty claim.

    Xylitol is also not normally metabolized, but Mortlock and his colleagues were able to develop strains (generally through spontaneous mutations, but sometimes with u.v. ray or chemical induced mutations) that could use it because ribitol dehydrogenase (which is usually present in the cells to convert ribitol to D-ribulose) was able to slightly speed up the conversion of xylitol to D-xylulose, for which metabolic pathways already exist. The ability of the strains to utilize xylitol was increased as much as 20 fold when first production of ribitol dehydrogenase was deregulated (the enzyme was produced all the time, not just when ribitol was present), then duplication of the ribitol dehydrogenase genes occurred, then the structure of the enzyme was changed such that its efficiency at working with xylitol was improved, and finally, in at least one case, a line regained control of the modified ribitol dehydrogenase gene so that the enzyme was only produced in the presence of xylitol. Here we have a complete example of a new metabolic pathway being developed through duplication and modification of an existing pathway.

    Actually we have seen duplication followed by mutation in at least one model system.

    So much for whereismysanity. So it isn’t an empty claim. Time to move the goal posts once again. Or maybe realize that evolution is a fact and theory. No doubt which way he will go.

    You guys have been doing this for thousands of years now. First it was Zeus and Apollo Helios. Then it was the flat earth followed shortly by geocentrism. Then it was creationism. Some people never gave up any of those.

  56. says

    Here’s an interesting video overview of Jack Szostak’s work. Set to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 9th? OK, if the science bores you, just listen to the music.

    What an incredible load of horsepookey.

    There must be an very large number of “sinners” among the ranks of science:

    “The only sin is to pretend”- Annie Druyan

    You have to pretend to sell this bill of goods…or be as dense as neutronium.

  57. Boomer says

    MAJeff @ #46 –

    I was actually just looking into the BSO, and Boston Pops last night, since I will be in Boston for the week of July 14-18. But it looks to me like there isn’t anything really going on then, it’s between seasons (not to mention the baseball all-star break)! I couldn’t have timed my visit worse, apparently. But at least I’ll try to see the aquarium and MIT, Harvard, etc.

    I have been to the local symphony, it wasn’t too bad. Maybe I’ll have to go more often. I’d just like to see a world-class orchestra once in my life too :)

  58. ScentOfViolets says

    Given the comments about evolution in abiogenesis, perhaps more effort should be spent on the distinction between the evolution of life, and evolutionary processes. There is some speculation that universes are routinely created from black holes, each with a different set of physical laws, that some sets of laws favor black hole formation, and that universes with more black holes spawn proportionally more universes, which at least partially inherit the progenitor’s characteristics. So universes can evolve, and selection principles act so that certain types of universes predominate, but I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that this has much to do with life.

    More prosaically, look at the incremental improvements process that some car manufacturers employee. A series of small changes accumulate in each successive generation of vehicles, so that the nth generation bears little resemblance to earlier iterations. So the a close variant of the principle of evolution is at work, yet no one would say that automobiles mimic the evolution of life.

    I would say that this is actually the chief philosophic importance of evolution: not that it explains the variety of life on Earth today, but that it is an extremely powerful procedure for producing differences in kind out of a series of small changes of degree.

  59. raven says

    Movethegoalposts:

    Since Steve doesn’t think life is magic, why is it that scientists still can’t seems to create life in a laboratory? After all, it’s all so ‘simple’!

    Actually, there are several projects running to create life in the laboratory. Not just Szostaks. One or two of them are probably within a year or two of “creating life in the laboratory.”

    But it won’t matter. The creos such as yourself will simply wave their hands and ……Movethegoalposts. That god you insist on hiding in the gaps has been moving to new gaps for a few hundred years now. Not much of a diety if he has to keep running from a bunch of scientists wearing jeans, T shirts, and tennis shoes.

    Whereismysanity:

    We have NO problem with you guys believing in fiction, but we just request that you cease to teach it to unsuspecting children as it were factual.

    Evolution is both a fact and theory. Genesis is mythology, one of dozens of creation myths. It is obvious that the bronze age sheepherders who compiled it, thought of it as such 4,000 years ago. They would laugh at people today who thought it was a literal description of events.

    We would laugh too if the creos weren’t seriously trying to overthrow the government, set up a theocracy, and head on back to the Dark Ages.

  60. Nick Gotts says

    Bishop Pontoppodan@62.
    Do you actually have a point to make, my lord Bishop? If so, may I respectfully suggest that you remove your mitre from your fundament, and make it?

  61. says

    A crystal lattice of billions of atoms takes less information to describe fully than does an amorphous blob of glass, which is non-crystalline.

    Define what you mean by “information”, without employing an equally vague word like “disorder”. This statement could apply to Kolmogorov (the program to write out the structure is shorter for a crystal than a glass) or to Shannon-Boltzmann-Gibbs (more microstates fall into the glass macrostate than the crystalline one). It makes some amount of intuitive sense, but intuition without precision fails when one tries to transfer it to another example.

    Shannon wasn’t all about probability distributions.

    How do you write the sum over i of minus p_i log p_i without p?

  62. mcmillan says

    Very cool stuff, I was disappointed when Szostak was speaking at my university at the same time as my departmental seminar, which also happened to be a big name that’s relevant to my own work.

    I agree with others saying this kind of thing is super speculative. I saw Andrew Ellington talk about this subject at AAAS this year, he made a good point that it’s probably nearly impossible to know if we’ve figured out THE way life got started here on Earth. This research is more to show that it’s possible. I’ve only seen Szostak talk once a couple years ago, so I don’t remember if he acknowledges the same thing or not.

    Peter Ashby:

    His growing vesicles are a competition for the most polymerised DNA, the sequence is irrelevant. Sorry, completely unconvinced.

    I think the point is that if you get a replicator that can polymerize it will get more copies of itself into each of the vesicles after they split. So first there’s competition within the vesicle, and then between different vesicles.

    I agree with you that DNA isn’t the way to go, but my impression was Szostak and others aren’t working with DNA either, though the “pcr” description in this video kind of implies their model is similar anyway. From what I’ve heard RNA isn’t much better though, there was probably something else even before RNA came around. That’s where a lot of this work is heading, trying to figure out other nucleotides that might have worked.

    I’d be curious to see that reference for RNA only ribosome functioning. I know the crystal structure showed only RNA in the catalytic site, so it seems plausible. I wasn’t aware of anyway actually trying to make it work though.

  63. MAJeff, OM says

    Posted by: Boomer | June 16, 2008 11:16 AM

    There may be something at Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home. It’s a couple hours west, but if you’ve got a rental…

  64. CosmicTeapot says

    Nice video, elegant and simple.

    I like elegant and simple (unless it’s a creationist in a baal gown).

  65. Boomer says

    There may be something at Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home. It’s a couple hours west, but if you’ve got a rental…

    Thanks MAJeff! I’ll check it out!

  66. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    Nice, “Exploring Life’s Origins” again, but not pushing replicase action in their protocells but instead going for the simplest system.

    I was just going to grouse that the supply of naturally occurring nucleosides was glossed over, but then I saw on
    Szostak’s lab site that they look at glycerol nucleosides. That could be solving the problem, with nucleotides naturally occurring in meteorites at the very least, and fatty acids and glycerols presumably occurring in hydrothermal vents.

    In fact, I think I just saw a fresh press release on finding abiotically synthesized oil from vents. (I assume tested by isotope analysis; I didn’t check.) That could also be a basis for rejection of the ELO site’s impression that fatty acids were dilute in most conditions.

    All in all a convincing pathway then. IIRC they even found some type of vesicles among the Murchison meteorite biomaterial, so a better observation of how common they should be couldn’t be asked for.

    So, if fatty acid vesicles are stable over “days or months” (EOL) under conditions of fatty acid supply, how long would they last even if in a state of attrition by acid loss in the open sea? If they were able to spread over nearby hydrothermal vents it would be another promising feature of this pathway to life. Early spread could make this pathway likelier than the stationary ones.

    I think Nick Gott is correct here, soon the discussion will slip over into such discussions of the likeliest among known pathways. I also hope that there will by then be some complementary statistics over the conditions around biospheres, their likelihood, and their formation.

    AFAIU it know seems like astronomers will be able to tell atmospheric compositions and actually map temperature distribution for habitable planets as well as for todays hot ones. The just released latest Harps data makes super Earths out as observed in one third of solar-like stars, surpassing super Jupiters at ~ 20 % IIRC. Not even accounting for a large observational bias for that method of detection.

    Considering that over 90 % of stars (AFAIU from F2 and below) drops in rotation, indicating planetary systems sharing the angular momenta (and remembering the high amount of unexpected orbit eccentricities) that could mean many Earth analogs out there!

  67. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    And I also see now that the EOL page was already referenced, albeit with the wrong name. My apologizes.

  68. Torbjörn Larsson, OM says

    In other words, general principles of evolution are applicable to stuff simpler than any extant living cell, stuff we would still label an “origin of life” affair.

    Of course there isn’t any exact division any more than you can point to a population and claim that this is the moment of speciation into two sufficiently separate populations. But IMHO it is reasonable to claim that it is two separate areas, however you define them:

    1. Todays MET is gene centered, defined around the usual concept of heredity. Even under conditions of quasispecies, LGT, protein and protein architecture phylogeny, et cetera, identifiable lineages and so phylogeny is important. I see N. Wells makes this point too.

    2. Abiogenesis will incur some mechanisms in different phenomena, and perhaps new mechanisms.

    3. There is a darwinian threshold with a recognizable state transition for faithfulness of replication in evolutionary systems.

    4. If you qualify such a separation, however fuzzy, evolution is independent of abiogenesis. It doesn’t predict abiogenesis (as it is today), nor is it depending on how the system looked like before passing the threshold to the first identifiable lineage.

    Seems like an awful lot of speculation. Have we even SEEN any evidence of these early cells?

    It is enough to demonstrate a possible pathway, as there is no competing scientific explanation.

    As regards evidence, according to evolution we are the evidence of a first ancestor population.

    But there is also evidence for early life, even if it is ludicrous to believe we will have evidence for the very first replicators. It is a bother to collect those references, instead this page gives a reasonable overview. Oldest possible microfossils are from 3.8 Ga, which is just after the Late Heavy Bombardment and concurrent with the first preserved sedimentary rocks. The Earth oceans are older though, from at least 4.3 Ga, as recorded by zircon crystals:

    According to Harrison, the view of the early Earth devoid of water and continents “is largely a myth we created in the absence of observational evidence.” The indirect observations informing the Hadean model were derived from observations of the moon, where many of the largest impact craters peppering its surface dated to the end of the Hadean. “If the moon got whacked, we got whacked even harder. For every major impact on the moon, then maybe there were a dozen impacts on Earth,” he says. “But impacts only last a moment and there’s over 500 million years of Earth history missing,” he adds, suggesting the Earth’s crust and hydrosphere had ample time to recover between impacts.

  69. CosmicTeapot says

    Mohamed

    Throw out the hadiths (mans interpretation of the koran) and then see how much of the koran makes sense.

    Or was this satire?

  70. Steve says

    Mere speculation masquerading as science. I swear, you evolutionists sure convince yourselves that Fairy Tales are true! As a Christian, I am envious of the faith you display. If only I had 10% of your faith!

  71. says

    Mere speculation masquerading as science. I swear, you evolutionists sure convince yourselves that Fairy Tales are true! As a Christian, I am envious of the faith you display. If only I had 10% of your faith!

    Poe?