DNA animation

[Piotr Wyderski]

John Larkin wrote:

Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

Great. Created by whom?

> Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

Out of thin air?

Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to
explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame
explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.

Best regards, Piotr

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 00:31:41 +0300, Dimiter_Popoff <dp@tgi-sci.com>
wrote:

On 5/13/2019 23:48, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 13/05/19 21:21, John Larkin wrote:
Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

All that has done is punted the problem from /here/
to /there/. None of the interesting questions are
addressed let alone answered!

Well the interesting questions are way beyond our knowledge (yet?...).

Evolution as we know it since Darwin can be designed into life by a
creator or life can have occurred spuriously and then evolved etc.,
that much we can ask. Of course if a creator has created life who
created the creator is the obvious next question, not sure if
it counts as one of the "interesting" ones .

And that superbly complex cellular mechanism, so nicely visualized
in the video John posted (mesmerizing to just look at) has come
into being.... how? Spuriously, by sheer chance? Does not look like it,
I would think it is no more statistically probable than say stable
nuclei to go into a chain reaction. OTOH given enough time who knows...
Then if a creator made it - again, who designed the creator.

Like you say, the best answers to that we have is "we don't know".
Neither do we know if we can possibly know these answers.

We may never know the origin of the universe or the origin of life.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 13 May 2019 21:48:06 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 13/05/19 21:21, John Larkin wrote:
Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

All that has done is punted the problem from /here/
to /there/. None of the interesting questions are
addressed let alone answered!

Well, get creative. This is a design group.

There's no reason that the critters that designed us would have to be
like us. Maybe they invented DNA as a sort of joke.




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Martin Brown]

On 12/05/2019 03:49, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?

We know the abundances of the elements that come out of the Big Bang.

It was one of the contributions of Alpher-Bethe-Gamow in the 1940s.
Basically the Big Bang can only make elements out to lithium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

The a lithium isotope and deuterium are important as firelighters for
getting low mass stars to ignite nuclear reactions (and for H bomb
makers which is why you can't trust Lithium to have natural abundance).

You can't do much organic chemistry without a decent amount of carbon
and that doesn't get made in the initial phase of the big bang.

Bethe & Hoyle went on to work out the stellar nucleosynthesis processes.

BTW It doesn't put much of a bound on things since the sort of big stars
that are big enough to go supernovae and expel bulk iron (and heavier
still elements) burn through their fuel supply very rapidly indeed.

Essentially it is like having a candle that is almost all wick!

It may seem like a paradox but the more massive the star the shorter its
life span because of the larger region deep inside it where pressure and
temperature can sustain nuclear reactions. When the fuel finally runs
out the core goes into freefall and it goes supernova. We are in a very
literal sense made from the ashes of some previous star. You can put
bounds on when from the ratios of certain long half life species.

Shockwaves from nearby supernovae also help star forming regions to
become dense enough that they can collapse under gravity.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 14/5/19 8:56 am, Tim Williams wrote:

"Phil Hobbs" <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in message
news:qbcroq$ia2$1@dont-email.me...
Well, no.  Feynman's famous essay from 60 years ago is memorable, but
atoms are the same size now as they were then.   In 1959 you could do
litho with a crayon, and today folks making feature sizes of ~10 lattice
constants of silicon in the lab and ~15 in production.

So not so much room remaining, really.

In two dimensions, perhaps!  But until we have cubic dies, I will
maintain that statement.

Hard to get the heat out if you go properly 3D. You'd need a densely
folded structure with the hot bits around the folded surfaces, and
reticulated fluid cooling... wait, that's starting to sound remarkably
like the cortex of a brain!

But even then, molecular machines can do far more interesting things
with far fewer than a thousand atoms.  There is still just a little room
left below there!  Terrifically hard to design though; you practically
have to resort to evolution. :^)

And even harder to debug... plus you have to think about fault recovery.
The smaller the machinery the smaller the error that fouls up its
operation... you need, hmm what shall we call this... and immune system?

Clifford Heath

 

[Tim Williams]

"Phil Hobbs" <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in message
news:qbcroq$ia2$1@dont-email.me...

Well, no. Feynman's famous essay from 60 years ago is memorable, but
atoms are the same size now as they were then. In 1959 you could do
litho with a crayon, and today folks making feature sizes of ~10 lattice
constants of silicon in the lab and ~15 in production.

So not so much room remaining, really.

In two dimensions, perhaps! But until we have cubic dies, I will maintain
that statement.

But even then, molecular machines can do far more interesting things with
far fewer than a thousand atoms. There is still just a little room left
below there! Terrifically hard to design though; you practically have to
resort to evolution. :^)

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

Bill Sloman wrote:

> The variations that disrupted the programs already there killed the organisms that embodied them. The variations that worked as an improved program made the organisms that carried them more competitive, so they came to dominate the population.

Improvement isn't exactly an objective term, as what counts as an
improvement is due to the varying metric imposed by the environment.

There are only lethal and non-lethal mutations. The former ones are
quickly and efficiently removed from the gene pool. The latter are
indifferent. Then only a very specific context can provide them with
some transient value (or not). Take the sickle cell disease for one
example. In Europe this means something pretty undesirable, but exactly the
same mutation makes one much less susceptible to malaria. For sure
something good to have in Africa.

Claiming that evolution leads to improved fit is a severe abuse of the
whole concept and exposes an attack surface.

Best regards, Piotr

 

[George Herold]

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 4:22:09 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 13:01:16 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 2:31:06 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2019 00:49:55 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Bill Sloman wrote:

The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even bother to try.

What has always amazed me is the creationists' ability to claim
simultaneously that natural processes are not enough to create something
as complex as life, but seeing no problem with the existence of an
infinitely more complex entity that needs to be brought as a basis for
an "alternative explanation". In other words, life is too complex to
be created "by accident". Gods apparently aren't.

OK, evolution theory is wrong, genetics is a random fluke that happens
to work by pure accident, be that as it may. So now let's talk about a
credible theory of theogenesis...

Best regards, Piotr

What amazes me, or sadly doesn't much any more, it that the only ideas
that most people have, about possible alternates to primordial soup on
Earth, accidentally creating RNA which accidentally invented and
programmed DNA, is to scream "creationist!"

Yeah, sadly science has now become political.
This was in the Nat. Rev. today,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/evolutionary-theory-crowning-achievement-western-civilization/
(nothing new)

I took a seminar in college called the "origin of life".
Interesting to me... but there are not any new ideas since
then... AFAICT.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life

We need to find other types of life to give us new ideas...
But if it started on Earth, then I think we're stuck with it
coming out of the primordial soup somehow.

George H.


Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

We've had electricity for a couple of centuries and electronics for
around 100 years, and we're just starting to understand our own
chemistry. What could some ancient civilization do in 10,000, or a
million years? Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

It's very probable. At least as good as the soup thing.

Yeah I have no idea. Right after there was water we had
stromatilites... bacterial colonies.. well
not right after, but ~0.5 billion years..
still that suggests something was already cooked up.
I mean how far back can we look on Earth.. bacterial
fossil-wise?

There's the mars theory.. that mars cooled first, and maybe
life seeded/started there. We should send more robots to
mars and other places.

George H.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[George Herold]

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 5:31:47 PM UTC-4, dp wrote:

On 5/13/2019 23:48, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 13/05/19 21:21, John Larkin wrote:
Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

All that has done is punted the problem from /here/
to /there/. None of the interesting questions are
addressed let alone answered!

Well the interesting questions are way beyond our knowledge (yet?...).

Evolution as we know it since Darwin can be designed into life by a
creator or life can have occurred spuriously and then evolved etc.,
that much we can ask. Of course if a creator has created life who
created the creator is the obvious next question, not sure if
it counts as one of the "interesting" ones .

And that superbly complex cellular mechanism, so nicely visualized
in the video John posted (mesmerizing to just look at) has come
into being.... how? Spuriously, by sheer chance? Does not look like it,
I would think it is no more statistically probable than say stable
nuclei to go into a chain reaction. OTOH given enough time who knows...
Then if a creator made it - again, who designed the creator.

Like you say, the best answers to that we have is "we don't know".
Neither do we know if we can possibly know these answers.

Sure, but it costs nothing to speculate. As soon as we can
look in the fossil record, we see life! Stromatolites
From nothing to bacterial colonies in 0.4 billion...
That seems like a huge step!
and then 2 billion till Eukaryotes?

I have no idea, but seeding doesn't seem crazy...
lotsa time before our solar system.

George H.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff, TGI http://www.tgi-sci.com
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.flickr.com/photos/didi_tgi/

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 4:31:06 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 00:49:55 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:
Bill Sloman wrote:

The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even bother to try.

What has always amazed me is the creationists' ability to claim
simultaneously that natural processes are not enough to create something
as complex as life, but seeing no problem with the existence of an
infinitely more complex entity that needs to be brought as a basis for
an "alternative explanation". In other words, life is too complex to
be created "by accident". Gods apparently aren't.

OK, evolution theory is wrong, genetics is a random fluke that happens
to work by pure accident, be that as it may. So now let's talk about a
credible theory of theogenesis...

What amazes me, or sadly doesn't much any more, it that the only ideas
that most people have, about possible alternates to primordial soup on
Earth, accidentally creating RNA which accidentally invented and
programmed DNA, is to scream "creationist!"

That's because you are a gullible twit, and haven't recognised that most of the arguments you parade have been cribbed from the creationist propaganda you read, but doen't seem to have been able to recognise as creationi8st propaganda.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Of course, it's probably impossible to make or use DNA without already
having all the cellular machinery in place to support DNA, which is
all created by DNA.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 1:31:25 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 07:56:38 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 10:42:44 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 07:50:18 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/19 03:48, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 4:45:56 AM UTC+10, Neon John wrote:
On Thu, 9 May 2019 11:42:12 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


I'm not a bit religious and I don't know exactly what your definition
of "creationist" is.

Someone who refuses to accept that evolution driven by natural
selection is quite capable of generating the diversity of life we see > >> >>>> around us.

Proof?

That's a scientific claim, not a mathematical formulation, which might be susceptible to proof.

Scientific hypotheses merely have to be falsifiable, and not yet falsified.

The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even bother to try.

Yes indeed.

The good thing about The Blind Watchmaker is that
it uses baby steps to take you through
- the mechanisms that evolution has available
- simple examples of how they can produce complex
results
It falsifies the "complexity requires a designer"
contention that is the mainstay of creationism. Or
at least it does for someone with an open enquiring
mind.

I really hope JohnL manages to put aside his
emotional baggage, and takes the time to read the book.

I've ordered it. I couldn't finish all of The Selfisg Gene. I hope his
style, and especially content, had improved some.
Someone (not here on SED) was suggesting I read "The Selfish Gene".
What didn't you like about it?

The basic concept is pretty much trivial, and he keeps repeating it.
It's boring.

John Larkin's capacity to engage with complex ideas isn't impressive. He misses the point, so his vanity drives him to decide that the point is "trivial" and writes the book off as "boring" rather than 'over his head".

What I'm arguing here is *against* emotional baggage. The history of
biology is punctuated by the mainstream asserting that things are
impossible, that turned out to be so.

Nobody here but me will even consider anything but self-replicating
RNA crawling out of promordial soup and going on to invent all the
stuff in the video. They can't allow themselves.

They can and do, but - absent any working examples of non-RNA/DNA based life - it doesn't get much attention.

Some sort of panspermia should be checked. We should fly robots
to the likely planets and moons in the solar system. That would be
fun even if we didn't find any other life.

Panspermia is one of those ideas that is numerically probable but
mostly mocked for emotional reasons. Like germ theory and earth
circling the sun.

I've not seen anybody mock it for emotional reasons. Absent any working examples it doesn't deserve much attention.

But probably not from our solar system, which is too small and too
young.

Our solar system is clearly old enough to sustain (and perhaps generate) at least one form of life. We don't know enough about the other planets (and their satellites) to know what they may have come up with (or if panspermia happens, what they may have come down with).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 00:16:36 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
<peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Tom Gardner wrote:

Many of John's points and questions indicate he can't
get past the concept that a creator isn't necessary.

Maybe he is right. But then he must accept that the creator
does require a creator too. By exactly the same reasoning.

Sure, but don't assume that they look like us.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 13 May 2019 15:31:25 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 11:31:06 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Of course, it's probably impossible to make or use DNA without already
having all the cellular machinery in place to support DNA, which is
all created by DNA.

So, is this a chicken-egg argument, that you label 'impossible'
rather than admit it's just complicated?

DNA can be used to store books and videos, by building it without
'cellular machinery', i.e. in a laboratory.

That's Intelligent Design.


It's make-able, and use-able,
>and no 'probably' about either. Yet, you are comfortable saying 'probably impossible'.

OK, crazy improbable. Look at the movie!

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 13 May 2019 23:56:35 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
<peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

Great. Created by whom?

Critters that were advanced a billion years after the Big Bang. Maybe
11 billion years ago. That's some head start.

Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

Out of thin air?

Build robots that mine planets to build robots. It's less absurd than
DNA building itself.

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a more
reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have. They might
have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid helium, or something.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000, or
100,000 years?

Why don't people believe in evolution?

Why don't people have ideas?

Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to
explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame
explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.

Maybe the old guys were simpler, and invented us for fun.

This isn't sifi. It's reasonable and probable.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 1:54:23 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 00:16:36 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

Tom Gardner wrote:

Many of John's points and questions indicate he can't
get past the concept that a creator isn't necessary.

Maybe he is right. But then he must accept that the creator
does require a creator too. By exactly the same reasoning.

Sure, but don't assume that they look like us.

Why would anybody bother to assume that?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 1:50:35 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 23:56:35 +0200, Piotr Wyderski
peter.pan@neverland.mil> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with
chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?

Great. Created by whom?

Critters that were advanced a billion years after the Big Bang. Maybe
11 billion years ago. That's some head start.

But not having anything heavier than lithium and beryllium would have made it tricky to negotiate the early steps in the evolution of life.

You need to have a had quite a few supernova to get enough of the heavier elements (like carbon and oxygen) to form population one stars.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Starlog/pop12.html

Having a head start from a very deep hole isn't all that helpful.

Terrestrial life doesn't make much use of the even heavier elements like iron and cobalt, but they do seem to be essential where they are used.

Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?

Out of thin air?

Build robots that mine planets to build robots. It's less absurd than
DNA building itself.

This does assume rocky planets around population one stars that have enough heavy metals to be worth mining. Not a feature of the early universe.

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a more
reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have. They might
have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid helium, or something.

Has the universe ever been cold enough to allow superfluid helium to form naturally? The background radiation temperature is now down to 2.725 K and superfluid He-4 has to be colder than 2.172K.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000, or
100,000 years?

Will we have got civilised by then?

> Why don't people believe in evolution?

They do, but they understand a whole lot more about it than John Larkin can manage.

> Why don't people have ideas?

They do. Some of us have even had patentable ideas, while John Larkin has to settle for having been part of team that had a patentable idea.

Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to
explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame
explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.

Maybe the old guys were simpler, and invented us for fun.

This isn't sci-fi. It's reasonable and probable.

It doesn't even qualify as sci-fi. It's pig-ignorant speculation with great gaping weaknesses that reasoning people can gleefully exploit.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Rick C]

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 11:31:25 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 13 May 2019 07:56:38 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 10:42:44 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 07:50:18 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/19 03:48, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 4:45:56 AM UTC+10, Neon John wrote:
On Thu, 9 May 2019 11:42:12 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


I'm not a bit religious and I don't know exactly what your definition
of "creationist" is.

Someone who refuses to accept that evolution driven by natural selection
is quite capable of generating the diversity of life we see around us.

Proof?

That's a scientific claim, not a mathematical formulation, which might be
susceptible to proof.

Scientific hypotheses merely have to be falsifiable, and not yet falsified.

The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated
the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even
bother to try.

Yes indeed.

The good thing about The Blind Watchmaker is that
it uses baby steps to take you through
- the mechanisms that evolution has available
- simple examples of how they can produce complex
results
It falsifies the "complexity requires a designer"
contention that is the mainstay of creationism. Or
at least it does for someone with an open enquiring
mind.

I really hope JohnL manages to put aside his
emotional baggage, and takes the time to read the book.

I've ordered it. I couldn't finish all of The Selfisg Gene. I hope his
style, and especially content, had improved some.
Someone (not here on SED) was suggesting I read "The Selfish Gene".
What didn't you like about it?

The basic concept is pretty much trivial, and he keeps repeating it.
It's boring.


What I'm arguing here is *against* emotional baggage. The history of
biology is punctuated by the mainstream asserting that things are
impossible, that turned out to be so.

Nobody here but me will even consider anything but self-replicating
RNA crawling out of promordial soup and going on to invent all the
stuff in the video. They can't allow themselves.
Some sort of panspermia should be checked. We should fly robots
to the likely planets and moons in the solar system. That would be
fun even if we didn't find any other life.

Panspermia is one of those ideas that is numerically probable but
mostly mocked for emotional reasons. Like germ theory and earth
circling the sun.

But probably not from our solar system, which is too small and too
young.

Why is panspermia any more likely than any other idea? It actually just punts the genesis to another location and provides the idea that life then came here from there?

Reminds me of a Benny Hill joke.

--

Rick C.

--+++ Get a 5,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Martin Brown]

On 11/05/2019 15:50, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 08:49:19 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/2019 03:10, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

It may take a lot longer than 50 years. We may never know how the
universe, or life, started.

I expect us to get close enough to a workable solution within a few
decades now and possibly the same for simulating consciousness.

Since we know sparking primordial gasses makes amino acids, why did it
become common decades after that discovery to speculate about origins
from comets or something?

A lot of the liquid water now on the Earth arrived in a later cometary
bombardment after the crust had solidified and chemistry in dense star
forming nebulae is capable of making quite a lot of complex molecules.

It isn't that far fetched that at least some of the precursors were made
in a hard UV illuminated environment as the solar system was forming. A
lot of simple organic chemicals have been seen in star forming regions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules

Glycine was first detected in 2003 (Wiki list is out of date):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/375637/meta

Curious C60 and C70 "dust" spectra had mystified astronomers for many
decades before the pure carbon compounds were found on Earth.

Sure, but a pile of TTL gates on a table don't spontaneously orgainze
themselves into a computer running Jill of the Jungle under MS DOS.

I have never seen Jill of the Jungle - how does it compare with Zork?

Chemistry though can be self organising when the right conditions arise
and certain clay like minerals look like pretty good templates.

Abiogenisis is at about the same position now as the previous dichotomy
in chemistry of vital chemistry vs inorganic chemistry. It was once
widely believed that there was something special aka "vitalism" about
organic chemicals that could never be replicated by inorganic ones. That
was until Wohler synthesised ammonium cyanate and showed that it was
identical to urea (the main component of mammalian urine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6hler_synthesis

Liebig and Pasteur never abandoned vitalism. Indeed almost none of the
old guard did it took almost a generation before it was generally
accepted in the chemical literature that you could make organic
compounds from inorganic raw materials.

The big problem isn't evolution, it's the origin of the incredible
cellular mechanisms around DNA. People shout that they are the same
issue, to avoid dealing with the obvious problem of origin.

You would doubtless also insist that Stonehenge was built by aliens as a
landing pad for flying saucers because it is no longer possible to see
the evidence of how stone age man actually constructed it.

RNA is slightly too good to be anything other than the result of
molecular evolution itself. It has all the required propertied of being
able to make self polymers, catalyse reactions and carry information.

It is possible that a much simpler sugar threose started the ball
rolling as the spine of the previous TNA. It is one of the avenues that
synthetic chemistry is looking at as a self organising mechanism. It can
also transcribe to and from modern DNA with existing enzymes.

Incidentally several very striking non-equilibrium self organising
chemical reactions are known which date back as far as Turing although
the most curious is probably the Belousov-Zabotinsky reaction.

https://www.faidherbe.org/site/cours/dupuis/oscil.htm

and

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Belousov-Zhabotinsky_reaction

Take a look at the pictures even if you don't understand the maths.

Poor Belousov was on the wrong side of the Iron curtain and was unable
to get his very counterintuitive reaction published. He gave up
chemistry as a result and it was rediscovered by Zabotinsky. It is
surprisingly tolerant and a useful educational demo of a very non-linear
reaction (it works because the cerium ion is a catalyst for driving the
reaction in the opposite direction to its present state).

There are designs that can use the chemical waves to do computations.
You can build a nand gate with it which is enough to build a computer.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 13/05/2019 23:19, whit3rd wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 6:48:18 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 6:09:19 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:

It basically spans the space of life forms and if there is a niche
with no competition eventually something will evolve to exploit
it.

Another assumption on your part. There is nothing to say all niches
will be populated.

If there is no competition for the niche then something will eventually
exploit it.

That is simply not true. For example, there are no creatures that absorb cosmic rays as their food source.

I really had in mind environments where a redox chemistry or light is
available that provides a source of energy. Even on the bottom of the
Mariana trench there is apparently life (much to many peoples surprise -
at least some experts reckoned the pressure would be too high there).

Nothing about these statements is 'simple'.

It's not so much 'untrue' as 'undecidable'. The biosphere, after all, DOES absorb
cosmic rays, and DOES require genetic variation, which comes (in part) from those
cosmic rays. Is a biosphere a 'creature'? Is absorption and utility evidence
that the radiation is 'as food'?

I had in mind the observation that if for some reason an isolated
population develops for a long period then some of them will diversify
to target newly available resources. The US hawthorn maggot targetting
apples newly introduced to the USA being one such example and already
well on the way to becoming a new species in less than 200 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympatric_speciation

Cichlid fish in the great rift alley are another example.

The 'niche' concept is similarly
ambiguous: who is to say what DOES constitute a niche? Is absence of an
occupant a temporary condition, or evidence that the ''niche' is nonexistent?

If there is no competition for some of the available resources then
something will eventually evolve to take advantage of that gap.

Now that we have much better diagnostics for finiding life DNA we can
find archaea and bacteria living very very slowly in deep mine rocks.
Indeed there is an exobiology laboratory inside our nearby deepest mine
in Europe along with the dark matter laboratory. They are practising
novel very sensitive techniques for looking life on Mars/Europa.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 09/05/2019 19:14, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2019 16:28:43 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 09/05/2019 15:37, John Larkin wrote:

make it worse, and the final, immensely complex, result would be a
competitive disadvantage.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482309/figure/retinal_degeneration.F18/

Oh wow! A pretty picture taken out of context. How interesting!

Why would a designer equip us with such a botched design having already
got it right in cephalopods? We have a blind spot where the nerve bundle
enters the eye. They do not. Ours is a considerably worse design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye


It is pretty much the difference between a bog standard cheap and nasty
webcam design and a thinned rear window astronomical CCD camera.

Why would variation and selection result in an extraordinally complex
and optically inferior eye, when squid had a better one already?

There are two fundamental solutions with wiring on the front of the
sensor and wiring on the back of the sensor. Molluscs and cephalopods
chose the best design by pure chance and vertebrates chose the other.

There is a huge activation step to shift from one to the other so having
made an arbitrary choice evolution was stuck with making incremental
improvements to what it had been given to work with. It is a well known
problem in global optimisation that you can very easily get trapped in a
good local optimum that is significantly inferior to the global one.

An omniscient intelligent designer would already know that the design
for cephalopod eyes was the right way to do it. So why give his "finest"
creation a second rate eyes and a third rate sense of smell?

To the best of my knowledge no human has ever mated with a cephalopod or
vice versa. It is highly unlikely that there would be any offspring.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown