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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Martini who wrote (18889)	7/7/1998 1:10:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39621

Don, the quotes are true, but they are all out of context. For example, the existence of water does inhibit the formation of dipeptides and polypeptides if one assumes that these molecular condensations occurred in aqueous solution (i.e., the "pre-biotic soup"). It is much more likely that these reactions occurred on surfaces where local concentrations of amino acids are very high (and local concentrations of water were very low), and thus there is no thermodynamic problem. In fact, virtually all biochemical interactions occur not in solution, but on cellular membranes (called the endoplasmic reticulum). What is interesting is that one of the citations you provided makes exactly this point: Nissenbaum, Kenyon & Odre, ON THE POSSIBLE ROLE OF ORGANIC MELANOIDIN POLYMERS AS MATRICES FOR PREBIOTIC ACTIVITY. 253-9. And the others allude to it. By using the prebiotic soup argument you are setting up a straw man. The real problem in hypothesizing the de novo origin of life is not the formation of proteins or proteinoids, but the formation of a self-replicating code for the formation of those molecules. But so what? It obviously did happen. The question is the mechanism. The fact that there are no adequate explanations today does not argue that one will not be found some time in the future. It simply argues that there is much we do not know. This is the great philosophical gap separating us. Life somehow started. You claim that because we cannot yet explain how, that somehow argues against a mechanistic explanation and is evidence of biblical accounts. I claim that it means that we don't know enough. Furthermore, you beg the question. If I claim that life had a mechanistic beginning you insist that I explain all of the details. But when I ask you about the details concerning divine origin you cannot answer. When I ask you to explain the voluminous contradictions between what we know to be true now and biblical accounts you cannot answer. By invoking a divine origin all you do is insert an extra layer of unknowns. So let me ask you this: what was the divine origin of the HIV virus, or DDT resistant flies or antibiotic resistant bacteria? You can't really believe that a god sits around trying to think up new organisms to terrify his favorite creation? CTC