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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mel221 who wrote (21087)	2/10/2012 1:27:41 AM
From: Solon	1 Recommendation Respond to of 69300

I doubt you will have to wait long. Our information base is become so deep and our tools so refined that we will soon say, "aha"! ... and all the "old" gods will melt before our eyes ... Scientists Discover New Clue to Chemical Origins of Life ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) — Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life. See Also: Plants & Animals Cell Biology Molecular Biology Earth & Climate Geochemistry Sustainability Fossils & Ruins Origin of Life Charles Darwin Reference Humus Origin of life Biochemistry RNA A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York has re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world. Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, they have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars -- threose and erythrose -- developed. The research is published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. All biological molecules have an ability to exist as left-handed forms or right-handed forms. All sugars in biology are made up of the right-handed form of molecules and yet all the amino acids that make up the peptides and proteins are made up of the left-handed form. The researchers found using simple left-handed amino acids to catalyse the formation of sugars resulted in the production of predominately right-handed form of sugars. It could explain how carbohydrates originated and why the right-handed form dominates in nature. Dr Clarke said: "There are a lot of fundamental questions about the origins of life and many people think they are questions about biology. But for life to have evolved, you have to have a moment when non-living things become living -- everything up to that point is chemistry. "We are trying to understand the chemical origins of life. One of the interesting questions is where carbohydrates come from because they are the building blocks of DNA and RNA. What we have achieved is the first step on that pathway to show how simple sugars -- threose and erythrose -- originated. We generated these sugars from a very simple set of materials that most scientists believe were around at the time that life began."

To: mel221 who wrote (21087)	2/10/2012 8:11:20 AM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

we don't know there is any set of natural process that encode information. We don't know today. That will change. I hope you realize that's a faith based opinion. What you call encoding is just random sequences of encoding chemicals that do something useful in its environment. No, it's real encoding. All coding does something useful otherwise it would be gobbleygook. If the sequence is incompatible with its environment, it dies and breaks down.... and forgotten. However, if the sequence is valuable, it will thrive in the environment. Over time, All you have is the encoding sequence that survives in its environment. Actually, if a particular strand of code is changed so that it doesn't code for what it's supposed to, it's normally the organism that dies. It is perhaps a mistake to think a specific encoding as something special. It is just software that controls a machine to survive in an environment. That IS something special. Find a book sitting on a stump in the woods and you're way off base to think some freak of nature created it from wood pulp and some natural pigment. >> BTW if it could happen it would have happened many times and would still be happening now and there would be a wide variety of very different unrelated genetic codes in existence. This is a good point. But chemistry and entropy favor certain outcomes over others. The ribosome we discussed earlier is highly preserved across almost all lifeforms on the planet today. The competitive advantage of this organization apparently allows it to compete for resources to the detriment of other organizations. The ribosome is a magnificent machine. Look at the human population and how our success is detrimental to many other forms of life on the planet... including some that have been around for millions of years. The success of the human population will destroy many mammal, reptile, bird, and fish species. We will eat them all. No, we won't eat everything else on the planet. And we haven't. There are loads of other organisms on earth and there always will be. My point was that such alternate genetic coding schemes ought to be coming into existence and some of the ones from the past ought to still be around ... just like cockroaches and rats and dogs and cats are still around.