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Politics : Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy of Death, Disease, Depravit -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (164)	10/15/2015 8:06:11 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1308

Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code "RNA world advocates suggest that if the first self-replicating life was based upon RNA, it would have required a molecule between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length. However, there are no known chemical or physical laws that dictate the order of those nucleotides. To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, materialists must rely on sheer chance. But the... odds of specifying, say, 250 nucleotides in an RNA molecule by chance is about 1 in 10 150 -- below the universal probability boundary, or events which are remotely possible to occur within the history of the universe." "The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. ... [The probability] is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck." (Robert Shapiro) "Most fundamentally -- the RNA world hypothesis does not explain the origin of the genetic code itself. In order to evolve into the DNA / protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines -- which themselves are encoded by genetic information. This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them." "In living cells, information-carrying molecules (e.g. DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery which reads that information and converts it into proteins are like the DVD player. Just like the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them." "This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription / translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language."

To: Brumar89 who wrote (164)	10/16/2015 3:44:59 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1308

but it would never spread As my mother used to say "Never is a long time". There are several ways that a change could become widespread even if the change had no current advantage. The change could be expressed in an individual who also has exceptional traits that are unrelated to the change. The new gene would be along for the ride. Genes don't survive by themselves, they survive when the whole organism and all the genes it contains survive. There is also a phenomina known as the "founders effect". This is where an individual happens into a niche that is currently underpopulated (an island for example, or a fish in a cave). In small populations there is a lot more incest and that makes the individual more likely to be mated with another organism that also has that gene. Haemophilia is a famous example of a harmful gene becoming widespread via close family breeding. Another gene spreading event that also relies on reduced competition is the "survivor's effect". It happens when most of an individuals competition is wiped out in some tragedy or ecological disaster. A subset of this is the "Gengis Khan" effect where males were wiped out but many females remained. All of these distortions in the equilibrium lead to punctuated differential survival rates, and any gene in the surviving organism benefits. They were lucky.