This is an amazingly stupid argument.
This guy claims that he can disprove abiogenesis. He has two arguments:
- Hydrolysis. All the molecules would be soaking in water, and water breaks down chemical reactions. He compares this to monkeys with typewriters, with the addition complication that they have to type in the rain.
-
Chirality. The typewriter has to be twice as big to accommodate both the left- and right-handed molecules, and if the monkey types the wrong handedness, the whole paragraph it’s typing is ruined.
I trust you can see the colossal flaw in his claim. If true, then no chemical reactions could occur in modern, living cells — all that water would be dissolving everything. If chirality was a problem, then no protein could be assembled without picking amino acids having the wrong handedness. The thing is, hydrolysis and condensation reactions are going on continually in the cell, and the whole system pivots on maintaining an equilibrium of disassembly and assembly. As for chirality, enzymes have extremely specific chirality requirements, and will only process molecules of one handedness — and only synthesize molecules of the necessary chirality.
To refute him, I only have to point out that he is mostly made of water, yet he isn’t dissolving in front of me, and that before he self-liquidates, his proteins are made up of only L-amino acids, and not a random mix of L- and R-enantiomers. This is basic biochemistry, and he doesn’t understand it.
Somebody may have confronted him with these facts, compelling him to slump into slimy racemic puddle years ago. H e hasn’t posted in over 3 years, and didn’t have more than 200 followers. Poor dumb creationist.
Has he heard of the RNA world? How does he know that the origin of life involves proteins at all?
RNA can be hydrolysed, too.
Any natural process for the formation of life, no matter how uncommon on an early Earth, seems more plausible than the a god saying a magic spell and creating stuff out of nothing.
What’s really going to blow his mind is how water is actually made (a byproduct) when constructing larger molecules!
When it comes to arguments that YEC Creationist one really is what you call pretty wet and a damp squib.
i get the impression that creationism is pretty much stagnant now and has been foe a while. I’m pretty sure they were trotting out the hydrolysis and chirality arguments years back without any more success.
Yup, seversky. Both in Panda’s Thumb and Talk.Origins back in the day.
<clickety-click>
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB030.html
https://talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/
HAPPY BLASPHEMY DAY!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_Day
What a delightful thing they created to help me celebrate my birthday . . . .
Ultimately Young Earth Creationism requires making a book, the Bible, more powerful than a supposedly omnipotent God. Because God creating the Universe and everything in it has to exactly match the details of the book. Which is nonsense given that many things they believe aren’t actually in the Bible. There’s no exact date for Creation, that’s Bishop Ussher’s interpretation.
The one that the likes of Dumb Idiot Ken ham takes to heart. Never mind that Earth’s history actually goes way beyond 6,000 years.
@Owosso Harpist:
Heck, human history goes way beyond 6000 years.
As the Onion put it, Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World, where they pointed out that the Sumerian city is 1500 years before that.
More seriously, Fred Clark over at Slacktivist has had a number of posts over the years about this sort of thing, including a 13-year old one about how hard it is to actually be a Young Earth Creationist over in Israel when any new construction project has a chance of digging up ruins older than that: You can’t have a 10,000-year-old house in a 7,000-year-old universe.
The Kish tablet is about 5,500 years old. Not quite “way beyond 6000 years”, you’re probably thinking of prehistory.
The people who wrote the Bible almost certainly didn’t know that. Accurately dating the ages of rocks took some fairly recent science and engineering breakthroughs.