Evolution and Creationism

[Freddy]

o_mlly:

o_mlly:

I answered your view of macroevolution…

You have done no such thing …

Yes, I have. Read the post again.

Macroevolution is the best speculation that science can offer today. However, the speculation does not meet science’s requirements as an hypothesis evidenced in part by the failure to precisely define the very event it purports to explain.

Back to you.

Got anything to add to what was merely your confession of faith in macroevolution?

The game was jacks or better to open. You opened, I called. Time to put your cards on the table. And now we see that you never had the jacks; your hand’s high card is just a 7 of clubs.

Looks like you’re talking to yourself. But we all make mistakes in formating a reply. Thing is, we’re waiting for a reply that gives your version of the process.

I really don’t think you’re going to give it. But that’s not going to stop me asking because, as I said, it shows to anyone reading this thread that you refuse.

 

[o_mlly]

Looks like you’re talking to yourself. …

? It’s a written, not spoken, reply. And it’s directed at you.

Put up some evidence that defends your faith in macroevolution as meeting the requirements of a scientific hypothesis. I’m all ears, or more correctly, all eyes.

 

[Gigantals]

Real fundamentalists hate the fact that I can turn the argument against them through the Magisterium, Tradition and Scripture (they very quickly resort to insults). You however are on the other side of the spectrum (which only makes me LOOK like a fundamentalist, since I’m blocking your view of the real ones), you only take what is convenient for you. I already gave evidence to prove why Genesis is written as a history book (and the next four books). If you wish to reject what was written with historical intent, then does that mean you reject all of Genesis? And the next four books? Because what could a group of goat farmers know compared to modern science, right?

If you take Gen 1:1 and John 1:1 in Hebrew, and substitute in the numerical values of the Hebrew letters, you get two universal ‘constants’; so clearly these parts of the Bible have more than just a filler purpose: The Mysteries of Pi and e: Fundamental Constants? – Chuck Missler – Koinonia House

Do you prefer personal interpretation over what the New Testament referred to as history? If Genesis was constantly metaphorical through the narrative and language used (which I have proven it is not), then I would consider it metaphorical; just as I would with any parables or stories in the Bible that we know to be written in the Hebrew literature narrative. The Pentateuch do not fall into this category.

 

[Gigantals]

Self-functioning RNA sequence? Interesting. That’s what, 31 amino acids long at minimum (I can’t read it so I’ll stick with that one number)? There’s still a considerable world of difference between a 31 amino acids here and the median length of an archaea protein (247), let alone a human protein (375). This was achieved in a lab through RNA splicing, not in the wild through natural expression. The smallest genome is still 290,000 base pairs long.

Why is there such a large difference in these lengths? Shouldn’t there be more ‘intermediary’ RNA chains capable of filling in the void between 93 and 290,000 polynucleotides to show a gradual increase in complexity (kind of like how the smallest multicellular organism has 100-1000 cells, yet the next smallest organism is only 1 cell).

Ligase may be present, but where’s everything else? These strands of RNA are capable of growing in size (ligation), but not replicating. DNA alone has 50 proteins needed to decode it, let alone replicate it. It sounds like these RNA chains would just grow until they are shredded by something (it’s not the inside of a cell, they could only grow because the lab provided them with extra nucleotides). Everything needs to be present to allow controlled replication, otherwise there is just chaos. This RNA will eventually self-destruct through uncontrolled growth, or would just slowly break apart once more.

They started off with an RNA chain. Amino acids are the only thing that have been found synthesising naturally. Maybe they should fill the gap between the amino acids and RNA first, because otherwise they’re making a very unfair assumption here that will get a lot of people prematurely excited.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Looks like you’re talking to yourself. …

? It’s a written, not spoken, reply. And it’s directed at you.

Unfortunately still containing absolutely nothing whatsoever as to what you consider the alternative to the process might be. Surely you have something to offer…

 

[Freddy]

Real fundamentalists…

There are people that you think are fundamentalists?

Good grief…It’s like a flat earther saying ‘Hey, you want to see what the real flat earthers believe!’

 

[Gigantals]

I see you’ve sunk to the point of using insults. Or you’re just not too good at humour.

You’ve made a very common mistake: “The term Catholic fundamentalism is sometimes used to describe conservative Catholicism, but most scholars would reject this term because Christian fundamentalism traditionally involved strict conformity to the “inerrant text” of the Bible (Protestantism). This is not a feature of Catholic conservatism.”

Technically, fundamentalists would have to stick to the Bible alone, without being able to use any of the scientific reports or evidence that come out since they’re not actually found in the Bible.

Besides, the flat Earth is disproven by the Bible and Church Fathers. I can send you a link to a Facebook page if you want so you can use those arguments yourself. The guy who wrote them is a friend of mine, who’s probably spent more time analysing the Bible and Church Fathers than all of us on this post combined.

 

[Freddy]

I see you’ve sunk to the point of using insults. Or you’re just not too good at humour.

I never get why people who hold to fundamentalist views (and trust me, believing that the planet is 6k years old is a fundamentalist view) always deny it. Or desperately try never to admit to it (no names). Hence your description of others as ‘real fundamentalists’. As if you are implying - ‘I don’t deserve that appelation myself’.

But even within this forum, within this Catholic community, your views are held to be such. In the greater community, especially in the UK which again I presume you are living, you’d do well to keep it to yourself. As you have already admitted you need to.

And publishing what you think to be credible scientific papers by paid up members of creationist organisations does not, and will not, change the description people will associate with you.

You’ve made your bed. You have to lie in it.

 

[Gigantals]

As I defined before, Fundamentalism is solely for Protestants. It centres completely around the Bible. We clearly don’t do that. We’re Conservative Catholics (unless you consider yourself a Conservative Catholic too, and don’t want to be associated with us; which would make a lot of sense now).

I’m sure you don’t speak for the entire community, so please don’t act like you do.

You fell into the trap that I warned you about. You seem to disregard wordplay when it comes to attempting to prove Creationists’ ‘duplicity’. This area is full of potholes, and you’ve driven into every one of them.

Creationism has God at its core. We don’t hijack theories that bring the whole ideology of atheism such credibility people can simply peel off the theism in all our work (and name) and it still makes sense to them; wondering why they even needed it in the first place.

We can get out of our bed tomorrow. Theistic evolution will one day find their atheistic brother covering their face with a pillow because they could never prove themself to be stronger than him.

 

[rossum]

Self-functioning RNA sequence? Interesting. That’s what, 31 amino acids long at minimum (I can’t read it so I’ll stick with that one number)?

I’m afraid not. That is zero amino acids. Amino acid chains are proteins, not ribozymes. RNA chains are more chemically active than DNA chains so there is no need to form a protein chain from DNA. RNA both stores information and is chemically active. Hence the RNA world hypothesis of abiogenesis. Neither DNA nor proteins are required, just active RNA chains: ribozymes.

DNA is a superior information storage molecule and protein based enzymes are better at chemical activity than RNA based ribozymes. What started as a simple RNA-only system developed into the more complex DNA-RNA-protein system that we observe today.

Life started out very simple; what we see today, even very simple life, is trillions of generations removed from those first just-about-alive primitive lifeforms, which were probably just some short RNA chains inside a simple lipid bilayer membrane.

 

[o_mlly]

what you consider the alternative …

An alternative to what? You posted an act of faith. Faith is subjective. I can’t argue with how you feel. Get back to me when you have a factual and rational argument that macroevolution is a scientific hypothesis. Cut the deflections, Fred. Try to start cutting the mustard, instead.

 

[o_mlly]

I see you’ve sunk to the point of using insults. Or you’re just not too good at humour.

Catholics often examine if an “either/or” proposition makes more sense if replaced with “and/both”. In your observation, the latter applies.

 

[Gigantals]

Thank you for correcting that, I misread what you put up.

But due to RNA being more unstable than DNA, would it not be less likely that it could create such large structures? The sheer problems required for it to even form…

1. First, it is not even clear that the primitive Earth would have generated and maintained organic molecules. All that we can say is that there might have been prevital organic chemistry going on, at least in special locations.
2. Second, high-energy precursors of purines and pyrimidines had to be produced in a sufficiently concentrated form (for example at least 0.01 M HCN).
3. Third, the conditions must now have been right for reactions to give perceptible yields of at least two bases that could pair with each other.
4. Fourth, these bases must then have been separated from the confusing jumble of similar molecules that would also have been made, and the solutions must have been sufficiently concentrated.
5. Fifth, in some other location a formaldehyde concentration of above 0.01 M must have built up.
6. Sixth, this accumulated formaldehyde had to oligomerise to sugars.
7. Seventh, somehow the sugars must have been separated and resolved, so as to give a moderately good concentration of, for example, D-ribose.
8. Eighth, bases and sugars must now have come together.
9. Ninth, they must have been induced to react to make nucleosides. (There are no known ways of bringing about this thermodynamically uphill reaction in aqueous solution: purine nucleosides have been made by dry-phase synthesis, but not even this method has been successful for condensing pyrimidine bases and ribose to give nucleosides)
10. Tenth, whatever the mode of joining base and sugar it had to be between the correct nitrogen atom of the base and the correct carbon atom of the sugar. This junction will fix the pentose sugar as either the alpha or beta-anomer of either the furanose or pyranose forms (see page 29). For nucleic acids it has to be the beta-furanose. (In the dry-phase purine nucleoside syntheses referred to above, all four of these isomers were present with never more than 8 % of the correct structure.)
11. Eleventh, phosphate must have been, or must now come to have been, present at reasonable concentrations. (The concentrations in the oceans would have been very low, so we must think about special situations—evaporating lagoons and such things)
12. Twelfth, the phosphate must be activated in some way—for example as a linear or cyclic polyphosphate—so that (energetically uphill) phosphorylation of the nucleoside is possible.
13. Thirteenth, to make standard nucleotides only the 5′hydroxyl of the ribose should be phosphorylated. In solid-state reactions with urea and inorganic phosphates as a phosphorylating agent, this was the dominant species to begin with. Longer heating gave the nucleoside cyclic 2′,3′-phosphate as the major product although various dinucleotide derivatives and nucleoside polyphosphates are also formed.

 

[Gigantals]

1. Fourteenth, if not already activated—for example as the cyclic 2′,3′-phosphate—the nucleotides must now be activated and a reasonably pure solution of these species created of reasonable concentration. Alternatively, a suitable coupling agent must now have been fed into the system.
2. Fifteenth, the activated nucleotides (or the nucleotides with coupling agent) must now have polymerised. Initially this must have happened without a pre-existing polynucleotide template (this has proved very difficult to simulate); but more important, it must have come to take place on pre-existing polynucleotides if the key function of transmitting information to daughter molecules was to be achieved by abiotic means. This has proved difficult too. Orgel and Lohrmann give three main classes of problem:

• While it has been shown that adenosine derivatives form stable helical structures with poly(U)—they are in fact triple helixes—and while this enhances the condensation of adenylic acid with either adenosine or another adenylic acid—mainly to di(A) stable helical structures were not formed when either poly (A) or poly(G) were used as templates.
• It was difficult to find a suitable means of making the internucleotide bonds. Specially designed water-soluble carbodiimides were used in the experiments described above, but the obvious pre-activated nucleotides—ATP or cyclic 2′,3′-phosphates—were unsatisfactory. Nucleoside 5′-phosphorimidazolides, for example were more successful, but these now involve further steps and a supply of imidazole, for their synthesis.
• Internucleotide bonds formed on a template are usually a mixture of 2′-5′ and the normal 3′-5′ types. Often the 2′-5′ bonds predominate although it has been found that Zn2+, as well as acting as an efficient catalyst for the template-directed oligomerisation of guanosine 5′-phosphorimidazolide also leads to a preference for the 3′-5′ bonds.

1. Sixteenth, the physical and chemical environment must at all times have been suitable—for example the pH, the temperature, the M2+ concentrations.
2. Seventeenth, all reactions must have taken place well out of the ultraviolet sunlight; that is, not only away from its direct, highly destructive effects on nucleic acid-like molecules, but away too from the radicals produced by the sunlight, and from the various longer lived reactive species produced by these radicals.
3. Eighteenth, unlike polypeptides, where you can easily imagine functions for imprecisely made products (for capsules, ionexchange materials, etc.), a genetic material must work rather well to be any use at all—otherwise it will quickly let slip any information that it has managed to accumulate.

 

[Gigantals]

1. Nineteenth, what is required here is not some wild one-off freak of an event: we can’t just say ‘it only had to happen once’. A whole set-up had to be maintained for perhaps millions of years: a reliable means of production of activated nucleotides at the least.

And if the DNA had broken, there wouldn’t’ve been a way for it to be repaired without preserving the information (though DNA would be better than RNA at this, since its more stable).

Now, if there were more intermediary forms of these RNA strands, then this might be more supported.

The RNA World hypothesis seems less realistic than the already weak DNA World.

 

[rossum]

First, it is not even clear that the primitive Earth would have generated and maintained organic molecules. All that we can say is that there might have been prevital organic chemistry going on, at least in special locations.

It is clear that such molecules could form. Research has shown that purines, pyrimidines, lipids and amino acids can all form in the conditions on the early earth. The first two give you RNA and DNA. Lipids give a cell membrane. Amino acids give proteins and enzymes.

Yes, there is a lot of complexity, but you have a lab the size of a planet and millions of years in which to experiment. You also need to remember that chemistry is not a random process.

How much of your long list of chemicals applies to DNA only and so is not relevant to the RNA world hypothesis?

Have your studies included the effect of liposomes, which can protect from some external influences?

 

[Gigantals]

I believe they all do, except for part of 15; since both require the formation of one strand before DNA requires the second complementary one.

Cytosine

Cytosine is a problem. It readily decomposes under solar UV radiation, which means that prebiotic synthesis should be carried out in the dark.

Synthesis of cytosine from cyanoacetylene and cyanate wouldn’t work because cyanate is rapidly hydrolyzed to CO₂ and NH₃. Instead, it can be synthesised by heating 10⁻³ M cyanoacetaldehyde with various concentrations of urea ((NH₂)₂CO) in a sealed environment at 100°C for five hours with 30–50% yields of cytosine. Urea is produced in spark discharge experiments with N₂, CO, and H₂O.

However, this wouldn’t work on the grounds of the unavailability of cyanoacetaldehyde and instability of cytosine. The cytosine can only be saved by stopping the reaction after five hours. But in a real prebiotic world, such a reaction would most likely continue with hydrolysis of cytosine.

Urea is too unstable to reach the concentrations required (>0.1 M). Urea exists in equilibrium with small amounts of its isomer (ammonium cyanate), and since cyanate is hydrolysed readily, more urea must convert to maintain the equilibrium ratio (around K = 1.04 × 10⁻⁴ at 60°C). A sealed environment wouldn’t be plausible in nature, and because this prevented escape of NH₃, thus unrealistically slowing cyanate and urea decomposition. In an open system, half of the urea was destroyed after 5 hr at 90°C and pH 7.21 and t½ is estimated at 25 years at 25°C.

The usual cross-reaction problem would intervene in the real world. For example, urea can react with glycine to form N-carbamoyl glycine, which would remove both urea and amino acids from a primordial soup.

Also, the primordial soup would be far too dilute, so the seawater would have to be concentrated by evaporation in lagoons. But this would require isolation of the lagoon from fresh seawater which would dilute the lagoon, evaporation to about 10⁻⁵ of its original volume, then cytosine synthesis can occur. However, such conditions are geologically ‘rare or non-existent’ today. Concentrating mechanisms would also concentrate destructive chemicals.

The conditions required for cytosine production are incompatible with those of purine production. So this scenario must also include a well-timed rupture of the lagoon, releasing the contents into the sea, so both pyrimidines and purines can be available at the same time for ligation.

 

[buffalo]

How is this relevant? Your calculation omits natural selection and so is completely irrelevant to evolution, which does include natural selection.

NS acting on protein formation? Enlighten me.

 

[Gigantals]

Lipids

Lipids have much higher energy density than sugars or amino acids, so their formation in any chemical soup is a problem for origin of life scenarios (high energy compounds are thermodynamically much less likely to form than lower energy compounds).

The fatty acids that are the primary component of all cell membranes have been very difficult to produce, even assuming the absence of oxygen (a ‘reducing’ atmosphere). Even if such molecules were produced, ions such as magnesium and calcium, which are themselves necessary for life and have two charges per atom (divalent), would combine with the fatty acids, and precipitate them, making them unavailable. This process likewise hinders soap (essentially a fatty acid salt) from being useful for washing in hard water—the same precipitation reaction forms the ‘scum’.

Some supporters of abiogenesis like to draw diagrams showing a simple hollow sphere of lipid (a ‘vesicle’) that can form under certain conditions in a test-tube. However, such a ‘membrane’ could never lead to a living cell because the cell needs to get things through the cell membrane, in both directions. Such transport into and out of the cell entails very complex protein-lipid complexes known as transport channels, which operate like electro-mechanical pumps. They are specific to the various chemicals that must pass into and out of the cell (a pump that is designed to move water will not necessarily be suitable for pumping oil). Many of these pumps use energy compounds such as ATP to actively drive the movement against the natural gradient. Even when movement is with the gradient, from high to low concentration, it is still carried out by carrier proteins.

The cell membrane also enables a cell to maintain a stable pH, necessary for enzyme activity, and favourable concentrations of various minerals (such as not too much sodium). This requires transport channels (‘pumps’) that specifically move hydrogen ions (protons) under the control of the cell. These pumps are highly selective.

Transport across membranes is so important that “20–30% of all genes in most genomes encode membrane proteins”. The smallest known genome of a free-living organism, that of the parasite Mycoplasma genitalium, codes for 26 transporters amongst its 482 protein-coding genes.

A pure lipid membrane would not allow even the passive movement of the positively-charged ions of mineral nutrients such as calcium, potassium, magnesium, iron, manganese , etc., or the negatively-charged ions such as phosphate, sulphate, etc., into the cell, and they are all essential for life. A pure-lipid membrane would repel such charged ions, which dissolve in water, not lipid. Indeed, a simple fat membrane would prevent the movement of water itself (try mixing a lipid like olive oil with water).

Membrane transporters would appear to be essential for a viable living cell.

In the 1920s the idea that life began with soapy bubbles (fat globules) was popular, but this pre-dated any knowledge of what life entailed in terms of DNA and protein synthesis, or what membranes have to do.

 

[Gigantals]

Amino Acids

Proteins are made up of 20 different amino acids (some microbes have an extra one or two). Amino acids are not simple chemicals and they are not easy to make in the right way without enzymes (which are themselves composed of amino acids).

The 1953 Miller–Urey experiment managed to make some amino acids without enzymes. It is often portrayed as explaining ‘the origin of life’, but that isn’t quite true.

Although tiny amounts of some of the right amino acids were made, the conditions set up for the experiment could never have occurred on Earth; for example, any oxygen in the ‘atmosphere’ in the flask would have prevented anything from forming. Furthermore, some of the wrong types of amino acids were produced, as well as other chemicals that would ‘cross-react’, preventing anything useful forming.

The amino acids required for functional proteins could never have been made by anything like this experiment in nature. When Stanley Miller repeated the experiment in 1983 with a slightly more realistic mixture of gases, he only got trace amounts of glycine, the simplest of the 20 amino acids needed.

Amino acids, sugars, and many other biochemicals, being 3-dimensional, can usually be in two forms that are mirror images of one another; ‘chirality’.

Now living things are based on biochemicals that are pure in terms of their chirality (homochiral): left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, for example. Here’s the problem. Chemistry without enzymes (like the Miller–Urey experiment), when it does anything, produces mixtures of amino acids that are both right-and left-handed. It is likewise with the chemical synthesis of sugars (like the formose reaction).

Origin-of-life researchers have struggled with this problem and all sorts of potential solutions have been suggested but the problem remains unsolved. Even getting 99% purity, which would require some totally artificial, unlikely mechanism for ‘nature’ to create, doesn’t work. Life needs 100% pure left-handed amino acids. The reason for this is that placing a right-handed amino acid in a protein in place of a left-handed one results in the protein having a different 3-dimensional shape. None can be tolerated to get the type of proteins needed for life.