Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases • Hacker News Board

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#121

Post by tlb » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #90

gmoot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. If we can put an upper bound on the rate (what is it?) we could rule out abiogenesis if we could lower that upper bound sufficiently. Most here seem to reason the other way around - it must have happened, so we'll just keep looking until we figure out how. I'd like to think that we could reach a point at which we could confidently say "this universe doesn't have the probabilistic resources to mak…

I don't see how one could rule it out, since we don't know the number of planets on which the conditions required for abiogenesis could have occurred. It's not limited to the # of planets in the volume of the universe observable from Earth.

Right, given the Anthropic principle the probability has to be nontrivial when multiplied by all the oceans and the lifetime of the planet, but also by billions of planets and billions of galaxies. So there may be no way of ruling it out by any experiment.

All you can do is build bigger vats, just like physicists build bigger supercolliders, hoping for a result.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#122

Post by dTal » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

Smithalicious wrote: post #109

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives? Even with panspermia life would have had to begin elsewhere. The universe would have been too hot at the Big Bang to support organic molecules if that theory is true. Even with “intelligent design” the intelligence would have its own heritage and origin. The implications of an alternative to abiogenesis seem outside the realm of scientific inquiry entirely. Is the desire here a coherent, de…

>Even with “intelligent design” the intelligence would have its own heritage and origin Is this really a given? Certainly there must be something in the universe that "started it all" and has no origin of itself. Or, alternatively, everything in the universe has a history stretching back infinitely far, but that's equally incomprehensible and still allows you to perform the same "trick" (in this case: life has always…

Without creating any new ones? I have quite a lot of questions for our erstwhile intelligent designer...

If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it).

I think an intelligent designer feels simpler to a human because "conscious entity" is implemented as a conceptual primitive in our minds, for obvious evolutionary reasons. The idea of a non-corporeal mind spontaneously arising feels more plausible than a single-celled organism spontaneously assembling, because we need many more symbols to represent the latter. But it's a misleading perception.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#123

Post by surfsvammel » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #114

surfsvammel wrote: post #105

I got extremely excited when I read the headline. Finally!, I thought. Then I read the first part: > Carell, an organic chemist, and his collaborators have now demonstrated a chemical pathway that — in principle — could have made A, U, C and G in principle , what? No! The headline implies that actual RNA had formed, spontaneously. Not in principal . Going back to arguing with Creationists.

It says RNA bases right in the title, though one has to know something about RNA's structure to appreciate its limited relevance - see aazaa's comment. The article claims the synthesis has been demonstrated, so I think that in principle is there because we do not actually know if this particular process occurred in nature.

Ok. My RNA/DNA knowledge is quite limited. But I still don’t get it. Did they come up with a way it could happen, or did they actually make it happen out of the “soup”. To me—as someone who knows little about it, except for the fact that having RNA/DNA spontaneously form under these conditions would be be awesome for our understanding of our origins, and would make a killer argument when talking to creationists—the difference between the two is very significant.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#124

Post by Smithalicious » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #122

Smithalicious wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even with “intelligent design” the intelligence would have its own heritage and origin Is this really a given? Certainly there must be something in the universe that "started it all" and has no origin of itself. Or, alternatively, everything in the universe has a history stretching back infinitely far, but that's equally incomprehensible and still allows you to perform the same "trick" (in this case: life has always…

Without creating any new ones? I have quite a lot of questions for our erstwhile intelligent designer... If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it)…

I agree completely with your points on complexity, but I also don't see why the causeless cause would more plausibly be simple rather than complex. In fact, I think a simple origin creates more problems than a complex origin; if the origin is simple, you need to explain why the universe is complex.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#125

Post by goldenkey » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #119

ramshorns wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things we're trying to figure out is how likely life is to form on an Earth-like planet. Of course it happened here, but we have no idea how common it is. If we do the chemistry and figure out the mechanism and it looks like it happens all the time, then that tells us one more term in the Drake equation and gives us a reason to go check out the exoplanets.

I don’t disagree that having tighter bounds for the Drake equation is worth investing time and energy into. I think we are going to find that the preconditions for life are quite common. The way solar fusion and supernovas work, what atoms are produced, The distribution of material and of those atoms within an accretion ring... if a planet forms at the right distance, then it will have the mix of chemical precursors.…

So the moon stirred the biosoup in a way only an earthmoon sized moon could? And then life formed?

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#126

Post by kremi » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #17

> Carell, an organic chemist, and his collaborators have now demonstrated a chemical pathway that — in principle — could have made A, U, C and G (adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine, respectively) from basic ingredients such as water and nitrogen under conditions that would have been plausible on the early Earth. The reactions produce so much of these nucleobases that, millennium after millennium, they could have a…

Indeed, the author does recognize it:

> The next major problem Carell wants to tackle is what reactions could have formed the sugar ribose, which needs to link to nucleobases before RNA can form.

Possibly something resembling the Calvin cycle could be the start you talk of. [1]

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-018-9840-1

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#127

Post by ibra77 » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #122

Smithalicious wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even with “intelligent design” the intelligence would have its own heritage and origin Is this really a given? Certainly there must be something in the universe that "started it all" and has no origin of itself. Or, alternatively, everything in the universe has a history stretching back infinitely far, but that's equally incomprehensible and still allows you to perform the same "trick" (in this case: life has always…

Without creating any new ones? I have quite a lot of questions for our erstwhile intelligent designer... If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it)…

> Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause?

Because everything we know about this universe needs a cause, nothing in this universe is causeless, so you can't simply say that "something" inside that universe is causeless.

And everything we know about life screams causality, from the need to eat and drink to generate energy, to sex for reproduction. If life can actually be causeless why is it so fragile and dependent on so many things to keep itself from death?

> A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe.

A cell is also not capable of creating itself out of nothing.

Your lack of knowledge/understanding about how can something create the universe is not a justification for assuming that it created itself.

You need a causeless cause (otherwise we wouldn't exist), so you either choose it to be the universe itself (which is a wild guess with zero evidence and hence not even scientific as you claim), or it is God (and yes you can't and will never understand how it is the first cause)

I'd rather believe in God and his messages to us that brought actual evidence, than believe in an unconscious universe creating itself with no evidence.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#128

Post by dTal » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

Smithalicious wrote: post #124

dTal wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without creating any new ones? I have quite a lot of questions for our erstwhile intelligent designer... If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it)…

I agree completely with your points on complexity, but I also don't see why the causeless cause would more plausibly be simple rather than complex. In fact, I think a simple origin creates more problems than a complex origin; if the origin is simple, you need to explain why the universe is complex.

We should seek to minimize incidental complexity; this is what an "explanation" is. "Explaining" the complexity of the universe by moving that complexity wholesale into an entity you're not allowed to ask questions about, doesn't actually "explain" anything at all.

Fortunately, there's an abundance of evidence that complex phenomena can (and do, more often than not) arise from simple rules. Apart from this being the goal of all physics, at which it has been wildly successful, we can find examples all over mathematics. The cellular automaton "Rule 90" is a nice visual example of this: the rules are only a few bits and the initial state is a single cell, but the behavior is a tantalizing mix of ordered structures on the micro scale and chaos on the macro scale - a suggestive metaphor for our own universe.

If you saw a picture of a section of Rule 90 without knowing what it was, and tried to explain it, which explanation feels more satisfying? A mathematical rule + initial conditions that fit into a few bits? Or "someone drew it in an image editor because they thought it looked pretty"? Which has more predictive power?

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#129

Post by dTal » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

ibra77 wrote: post #127

dTal wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without creating any new ones? I have quite a lot of questions for our erstwhile intelligent designer... If you're happy to entertain a causeless cause to explain life, why make it an intelligent designer, a very complicated object? Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? A cell is much simpler than anything capable of inventing the universe. All 'intelligent design' does is move the problem (and amplify it)…

> Why couldn't life itself be the causeless cause? Because everything we know about this universe needs a cause, nothing in this universe is causeless, so you can't simply say that "something" inside that universe is causeless. And everything we know about life screams causality, from the need to eat and drink to generate energy, to sex for reproduction. If life can actually be causeless why is it so fragile and depe…

To be clear, I think that both cells and gods are far too complex to be satisfyingly acausal. I'm not willing to entertain more than a few bits (in the information-theory sense) of acausality.

Of course, belief in God is an emotionally charged topic. Many people rely on their belief for many things, and trying to argue against it is seldom productive - I'm hesitant to engage for that reason. You're free to believe what you'd like. But, since you've brought up "evidence"

I don't agree that there is more evidence for God creating the universe than there is for some kind of spontaneous event. For a start, the existence of the universe is extremely verifiable, much more so than God - no matter how much you believe in the "messages". For another, the universe appears to governed by very simple rules of physics (although not quite simple enough for my "several bits" threshold of acausality, just yet). Attempting to explain a fairly simple phenomenon that definitely exists with a very complex phenomenon of uncertain existence doesn't seem to add any explanatory power, and in fact just multiplies entities unnecessarily. All you've done there is take the mystery, put it in a box labeled "God" (along with a bunch of other things), and then said we're not supposed to look inside the box.

Addendum - I don't think the universe needs a "cause", per se - causality is related to the arrow of time, and that is a property internal to the universe. That's not to say that nothing needs explaining, but I think we should focus on "simplicity" rather than "causality".

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#130

Post by mannykannot » Sun, Oct 06, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

surfsvammel wrote: post #123

mannykannot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says RNA bases right in the title, though one has to know something about RNA's structure to appreciate its limited relevance - see aazaa's comment. The article claims the synthesis has been demonstrated, so I think that in principle is there because we do not actually know if this particular process occurred in nature.

Ok. My RNA/DNA knowledge is quite limited. But I still don’t get it. Did they come up with a way it could happen, or did they actually make it happen out of the “soup”. To me—as someone who knows little about it, except for the fact that having RNA/DNA spontaneously form under these conditions would be be awesome for our understanding of our origins, and would make a killer argument when talking to creationists—the d…

The article shows that RNA bases were actually created in the lab. Furthermore, this is not the first time, but it is the first time they have all been produced by one process:

Now, Carell’s team has shown how all nucleobases could form under one set of conditions: two separate ponds that cycle through the seasons, going from wet to dry, from hot to cold, and from acidic to basic, and with chemicals occasionally flowing from one pond to the other. The researchers first let simple molecules react in hot water and then allowed the resulting mix to cool down and dry up, forming a residue at the bottom that contained crystals of two organic compounds.

They then added water back, and one of the compounds dissolved and was washed away into another reservoir. The absence of that water-soluble molecule allowed the other compound to undergo further reactions. The researchers then mixed the products again, and their reactions formed the nucleobases.

This is progress (especially as the yield is apparently quite high), but as both azaa and the last paragraph of the article point out, we are still lacking the ribose backbone of the RNA molecule.

I don't think it is possible to have a killer argument against determined creationists, as they do not regard evidence in the same way as you and I do. Any discusion with them will take the form of a whack-a-mole game.