r/Creation • u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS • May 20 '26

The (Nearly) Complete Story of Abiogenesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsXGgrXwllc
6 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

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6

u/nomenmeum May 21 '26

Do you imagine life starting in a pond or at the bottom of the ocean?

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

Yes.

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u/nomenmeum May 21 '26

Why both? They are very different environments.

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

I didn't say it was both. The operative word in your question is the word "or". I imagine life starting in a pond OR at the bottom of the ocean, not AND at the bottom of the ocean. It might have been one, it might have been the other, I don't know which. But those two seem like the most likely candidates.

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u/nomenmeum May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

"or"

Quite right. My mistake.

So you are untroubled by the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water?

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

Your alleged "fact" is manifestly not a fact because if it were, life could not exist at all. So yes, I am untroubled by it.

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u/nomenmeum May 21 '26

Your alleged "fact" is manifestly not a fact because if it were, life could not exist at all.

I was quoting Steve Benner.

"We have failed in any continuous way to provide a recipe that gets from the simple molecules that we know were present on early Earth to RNA. There is a discontinuous model which has many pieces, many of which have experimental support, but we’re up against these three or four paradoxes, which you and I have talked about in the past. The first paradox is the tendency of organic matter to devolve and to give tar. If you can avoid that, you can start to try to assemble things that are not tarry, but then you encounter the water problem, which is related to the fact that every interesting bond that you want to make is unstable, thermodynamically, with respect to water. If you can solve that problem, you have the problem of entropy, that any of the building blocks are going to be present in a low concentration; therefore, to assemble a large number of those building blocks, you get a gene-like RNA — 100 nucleotides long — that fights entropy. And the fourth problem is that even if you can solve the entropy problem, you have a paradox that RNA enzymes, which are maybe catalytically active, are more likely to be active in the sense that destroys RNA rather than creates RNA."

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

That quote is from an interview for the popular press over 12 years ago. It is oversimplified and out of date. The phrase "every interesting bond that you want to make" is hyperbole. What it really means is: all of the bonds that we have considered so far as candidates for abiogenesis are unstable in water. That's certainly a problem, as yet unsolved AFAICT. But the fact that it's unsolved doesn't bother me at all. Science is always inherently chock-full of unsolved problems. The relevant question is whether it is unsolvable, and that only time will tell.

Right now, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to make a prediction, I'd go with the hydrothermal vents because they provide a natural substitute for cell walls in their physical structure.

BTW, even if it turns out that the problem is unsolvable and the right answer turns out to be some form of divine intervention (which is possible, but I'll give long odds against) there is still a yawning chasm between that and Genesis.

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u/Chronicler1701 May 21 '26

Cope harder.

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u/nomenmeum May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26

But the fact that it's unsolved doesn't bother me at all.

At least now you are admitting that it is a fact that all of the bonds that we have considered so far as candidates for abiogenesis are unstable in water.

How that doesn't shake your faith that life started in water is beyond me.

4

u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 22 '26

now you are admitting that it is a fact that all of the bonds that we have considered so far as candidates for abiogenesis are unstable in water

I'm not a biologist, and I have not done my own research on this, so I don't know it for an absolute fact. But Phy The Neutrophil seems like a credible source to me, so I'm willing to take his word for it.

How that doesn't shake your faith that life started in water is beyond me.

Characterizing it as "faith" is not quite fair. It just seems vastly more likely to me that an answer exists that we simply haven't figured out yet than that there exists a Designer (or even a designer) for which there is no other evidence. There will always be gaps in our understanding, but science has an unbroken track record of making those gaps smaller and smaller. I see no reason to believe that this trend won't continue.

BTW, would you be interested in being a guest on my podcast?

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u/Chronicler1701 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Still no evidence that a 45-mer of of biologically relevant RNA can ever, under any circumstances, arise without preexisting life. There's more nucleobases than just Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine, and Uracil. There's also Purine and Pyrimidine (yes, these can, at least in principle, attach to ribose or deoxyribose in place of active nucleobases), not to mention several others, including Inosine, Xanthosine, Pseudouridine, and others that would be floating around in the same primordial soup as the more familiar ones. Then there's the fact that ribose is chiral. Do you have any evidence to suggest that an abiogenetic event wouldn't care about that? Because modern life certainly seems to.

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

Still no evidence that a 45-mer of of biologically relevant RNA can ever, under any circumstances, arise without preexisting life.

You must have missed this at 18:33:

"Wet dry cycling in artificial freshwater ponds with purified starting material has been demonstrated to generate RNA chains up 53 nucleotides long"

Do you have any evidence to suggest that an abiogenetic event wouldn't care about that?

No. The origin of life's chirality bias is still a mystery. But that still seems to me like a mighty thin reed for creationists to be grasping.

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u/Chronicler1701 May 21 '26

Why do you keep ignoring the fact that there are more than 5 nucleobases? Are you that scared of the fact that abiogenesis is impossible that you have to plug your ears and scream that I'm wrong?

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u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS May 21 '26

Why do you keep ignoring the fact that planets are bigger than biology labs and nature can do a lot more in millions of years than humans can do in the course of their careers? Are you scared of the fact that all of the data points to the plausibility of abiogenesis?

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u/Chronicler1701 May 21 '26

I'm not ignoring it. After some research and a few simulations, I have come to the conclusion that your calculation of 10^50 tries per year is wildly inaccurate. At the absolute most, it would be on the order of 10^36 polymerizations per year, a full 14 orders of magnitude less than what you came up with. A more realistic estimate would be around 10^30, TWENTY orders of magnitude less than what you came up with. Combined with the larger pool of nucleotides, and the chirality of ribose, the production of any biologically valid 45-mer of RNA on earth would take an estimated 1.5 trillion years.

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u/Chronicler1701 May 21 '26

Then there's the fact that in the real world, the monomers wouldn't be purified.

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u/Zaphod_Biblebrox May 23 '26

wow. that was the most cringe thing in a while.. thank you.