Literature
Post details: OOL: "The soup kettle is empty"
02/20/07
OOL: "The soup kettle is empty"
Origin Of Life theories all have to engage with the improbability problem. Researchers have to decide whether the low probabilities are telling them NOT to pursue a particular investigation, or whether there is sufficient to justify persevering. There is no escape from this, because natural selection cannot yet be invoked.
The majority of OOL researchers favour a reductionistic approach, via the Miller-Urey model of synthesis of amino acids in a reducing environment followed by the RNA World. Shapiro hows how improbable this option is and comments: "A highly implausible start for life, as in the RNA-first scenario, implies a universe in which we are alone. In the words of the late Jacques Monod, "The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.""
As an alternative paradigm, Shapiro favours the "metabolism first" scenario, where small bounded reaction-chambers reach the stage when significant chemical reactions take place but without replication. "Over the years, many theoretical papers have advanced particular metabolism first schemes, but relatively little experimental work has been presented in support of them. In those cases where experiments have been published, they have usually served to demonstrate the plausibility of individual steps in a proposed cycle." In this situation, a variety of events might be possible. "[B]ecause we know that evolution does not anticipate future events, we can presume that nucleotides first appeared in metabolism to serve some other purpose, perhaps as catalysts or as containers for the storage of chemical energy (the nucleotide ATP still serves this function today). Some chance event or circumstance may have led to the connection of nucleotides to form RNA." Perhaps because the experimental work is so limited, Shapiro is willing to entertain the possibility that this route to life is not so improbable, and that what happened on Earth could have happened elsewhere in the Cosmos.
From an Intelligent Design perspective, none of these research paradigms will succeed. This is because none of them address the challenges of biological information. For as long as researchers are content to immerse themselves in the chemistry, they will not progress beyond the empty soup kettle. Is information an accident? Or is information a hallmark of intelligent agency and design? This is why ID needs to be integrated within science and evaluated on its merits (rather than rejected because of the ideology prevailing within the scientific community).
A Simpler Origin for Life
By Robert Shapiro
Scientific American, February 12 2007.
The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. Energy-driven networks of small molecules afford better odds as the initiators of life.
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