Hello Chuzzlewit! The Pre-biotic soup remains a myth.
Referring to post 17794 you said: "There is no problem in linking amino acids together to form dipeptides and they do not rapidly break down in aqueous solution. In fact they are quite stable. Thermodynamics makes no such prediction about the hydrolysis of peptides."
Dipeptides, double linkages, are unimportant, Chuzz. The theory requires unguided construction of chains of hundreds of amino acids into polypeptides. There are several fatal flaws in this idea:
"The major problem in hooking amino acids together is that it involves the removal of a molecule of water for each amino acid joined to the growing protein chain. Conversely, the presence of water strongly inhibits amino acids from forming proteins. Because water is so abundant on the earth, and because amino acids dissolve readily in water, origin-of-life researchers have been forced to propose unusual scenarios to get around the water problem." Michael Behe, Prof of Biochemistry at Lehigh University in DARWIN'S BLACK BOX pg 169.
"The individual subunits in the polymer chain contain 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom less than the simple monomers from which they are synthesized. Synthesis thus involves the release of water ...
A major complication to working with proteins and nucleic acids was that they appeared to be much less stable than most small molecules."
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE GENE, V1, 4th ed. by James Watson et al. Authors on staff at MIT, Cornell, Yale,
"It is difficult to see how, under such conditions, the primordial soup could have existed at all ... it is now generally accepted that concentration of the soup was probably too small for efficient synthesis, particularly of biopolomers." Nissenbaum, Kenyon & Odre, ON THE POSSIBLE ROLE OF ORGANIC MELANOIDIN POLYMERS AS MATRICES FOR PREBIOTIC ACTIVITY. 253-9
"Next there is the problem of the concentration of the monomers in primordial waters. It has been emphasized repeatedly that the idea of an oceanic primordial soup is difficult to sustain on thermodynamic and kinetic grounds ... thermodynamic calculations predict vanishingly small concentrations of even the smallest organic compounds. Second, the reactions invoked to synthesise such compounds are seen to be much more effective in decomposition. ... DOSE points out that the concentration of amino acids in the soup would have been about the same as their concentrations in the oceans now." A. Cairnes Smith in: GENETIC TAKAEOVER AND THE MINERAL ORIGINS OF LIFE 46-7
"If there ever was a primitive soup, then we would expect to find at least somewhere on this planet massive sediments containing enormous amounts of the various nitrogenous organic compounds ... no such materials have been found anywhere on earth." Brooks & Shaw: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF LIVING SYSTEMS 360.
Protenoids/proteins could never accumulate in the oceans because water dissolves them! Beyond that; there are about 80 amino acids but only 20 are employed to make proteins in our flesh. Amino acids in our bodies are all left handed, L-amino acids whereas half the spontaneously generated would be the right handed D type.
So, against all science and probability the oceans fill up with aminos which somehow link into polypetides and finally proteins. What are the odds for accidental creation of thousands of different, distinct proteins, their links in perfect sequence, all left handed, when a single D amino acid in the mix would make them meaningless?
"Know that Jehovah is God! It is He that made us and we are His."
Psalm 100:3 ASV 1901
Hope to see you in Austin, Chuzz
Don
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