Hi there. And welcome! Yes I can sympathize with what you are saying. I also looked up at the "big trees" in the congregations and thought I would never be able to measure up. I was constantly reminded of that at meetings and assemblies. It was as though I was moving under a thunder cloud. It took me over thirty years to move out from under it, an uphill battle no less. Now I realize, we're all the same, each with unique talents as well as distinct shortcomings. Unnecessary to say, the thunder cloud has lifted. I can see the sunlight coming through. As you will often read on this forum, it gets better all the time.
Posts by Vidqun
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4Crystal Lake, Illinois, Goodbye, and Good Luck
by Phaedra ini spent the majority of my growing years in the crystal lake area, with a watchful eye under the tutleledge of the grownups whom i thought had it all figured out.
milkovetch, penkava, redman, gordon, and sterne, before the congregations split into 2 in the late 90s, i was already enamored into the truth with total belief and readying for the revelation book persecution.
then your families crumbled with red letters surfacing all around.. during and after a storm of controversies, scandals, and the like, i realized all people are people and prone to bad decisions and mistakes.
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What would be the perfect song to introduce a JW comedy sketch?
by usualusername1 ini have no idea.... .
any ideas will help.... .
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Vidqun
What about the theme of "Jaws" or "Sharknado"?
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
The article on Carter's experiments ends by saying: “The study leaves open the question of exactly how those primitive systems managed to replicate themselves — something neither the RNA World hypothesis nor the Peptide-RNA World theory can yet explain. Carter, though, is extending his research to include polymerases — enzymes that actually assemble the RNA molecule. Finding an Urzyme that serves that purpose would help answer that question.”
I believe it’s an exercise in futility. The distance from amino acid to RNA molecule is huge, even insurmountable. Those enzymes never existed freely in nature. Even if they did, how would they replicate and organize themselves in order to kick-start life? How would primitive life forms then transform into complicated life forms? This is science fiction at its best.
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
Cofty, for ordinary folk like us, it's good to visualize what is being said. It's a good teaching aid. Amino acid > peptide > enzyme > protein > (RNA > protein: self-replicating). According to Carter: “In this “Peptide-RNA World” scenario, RNA would have contained the instructions for life while peptides would have accelerated key chemical reactions to carry out those instructions.” So there we have the recipe for LUCA, now just to prove it in real life. Their findings are illustrated as follows:
Schematic diagram of likely peptide participation with RNA in the origin and evolution of codon-directed protein synthesis. Credit: American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology et al. J. Biol. Chem. 2013;288:26864.
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
Here's a second theoretical option:
“The RNA world hypothesis is extremely unlikely,” said Charles W. Carter Jr. “It would take forever.” Moreover, there’s no proof that such ribozymes even existed billions of years ago. To buttress the RNA World hypothesis, scientists use 21st century technology to create ribozymes that serve as catalysts. “But most of those synthetic ribozymes,” Carter said, “bear little resemblance to anything anyone has ever isolated from a living system… The collaboration between RNA and peptides was likely necessary for the spontaneous emergence of complexity,” Carter added. “In our view, it was a peptide-RNA world, not an RNA-only world.”
Our genetic code is translated by two super-families of modern-day enzymes. Carter’s research team created and superimposed digital three-dimensional versions of the two super-families to see how their structures aligned. Carter found that all the enzymes have virtually identical cores that can be extracted to produce “molecular fossils” he calls Urzymes — Ur meaning earliest or original. The other parts, he said, are variations that were introduced later, as evolution unfolded. These two Urzymes are as close as scientists have gotten to the actual ancient enzymes that would have populated the Earth billions of years ago. “To think that these two Urzymes might have launched protein synthesis before there was life on Earth is totally electrifying,” Carter said. “I can’t imagine a much more exciting result to be working on, if one is interested in the origin of life.” The study leaves open the question of exactly how those primitive systems managed to replicate themselves — something neither the RNA World hypothesis nor the Peptide-RNA World theory can yet explain. Carter, though, is extending his research to include polymerases — enzymes that actually assemble the RNA molecule. Finding an Urzyme that serves that purpose would help answer that question.Publication: Li L, Francklyn C, Carter CW Jr., “Aminoacylating Urzymes Challenge the RNA World Hypothesis,” 2013, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, 288, 26864; doi:10.1074/jbc.M113.496125
To visualize the problem, in your hydrothermal alkaline vents we should start off with something like this, perhaps in a more simplified form (something like the RNA of viruses, perhaps?):
According to Carter, the Ur-enzymes "launched protein synthesis before there was life on Earth." So, proteins were manufactured before cells saw the light of day. However, absolutely necessary for protein synthesis to succeed are the group II introns to edit and splice. Again we have the chicken or egg problem, for the cell or organism ribosome, with group II intron, to manufacture "just the right protein the organism requires at any given time." So, here a protein factory would have to start producing proteins before the factory has been built. This magical process has to spontaneously perpetuate and improve over the millenia until we end with something like this, the working of which is explained by the following article:
A major function of RNA is copying all genetic information and making it readable by the cellular protein factories, the ribosomes. But RNA needs to be edited, and an early step in the editing process is splicing. Splicing consists of breaking apart the RNA and recombining its pieces in ways that produce just the right protein the organism requires at any given time. In many organisms this vital cut-and-paste action is sometimes self-catalyzed by intrinsic RNA components called group II introns. In more complex organisms, including humans, the process is performed by a similar yet more sophisticated machinery, the spliceosome, which has evolved from and works like the group II introns. “Splicing is a very basic phase of gene expression,” said Pyle, who is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Whenever splicing gets messed up, you’ll find a disease that results. Until now we haven’t really understood the splicing reaction chemically.” The researchers said RNA may perform more functions than previously thought. “RNA is revealing its ability to utilize metals in the environment to do its chemical transformations,” Pyle said. “RNA can do complex chemistry, just like a protein can.”
The article is titled “Visualizing group II intron catalysis through the stages of splicing.”
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
After all that, perhaps now is a good time to continue the thread topic. Cofty, a few questions for you. Which one of the abiogenesis theories do you support? Quite a few doing the rounds. What, in your opinion, would have been first, the cell or the gene? If it was the gene, DNA or RNA? High levels of ultaviolet light would have affected the gene adversely, so perhaps first the protective layer of a cell would be necessary. In a deep sea environment the ultraviolet threat would be cancelled out.
The general one is the “RNA world” theory, which posits that RNA – the molecule that today plays roles in coding, regulating, and expressing genes – elevated itself from the primordial soup of amino acids and cosmic chemicals to give rise first to short proteins called peptides and then to single-celled organisms.
However, for the hypothesis to be correct, ancient RNA catalysts would have had to copy multiple sets of RNA blueprints nearly as accurately as do modern-day enzymes. That’s a hard sell; scientists calculate that it would take much longer than the age of the universe for randomly generated RNA molecules to evolve sufficiently to achieve the modern level of sophistication. Given Earth’s age of 4.5 billion years, living systems run entirely by RNA could not have reproduced and evolved either fast or accurately enough to give rise to the vast biological complexity on Earth today.
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
A Ha, you are mistaken to imply I use my rule to prove God exists. Take note, this is what I said (allow me to quote myself):
It's a rule from personal experience. This is what I see in nature. So far I have not seen anything else to contradict the rule, so I stick with it.
Here I implored Viv to leave God out for the moment:
Not even one example? Not even a little one? Well, my rule stands then. Let's leave God out of the equation for the moment. This is the way nature works, whether you like it or not.
See, God doesn't come in the picture here. That's my belief from what I gather from the evidence, nothing more, nothing less. In order to disprove my rule, you must come up with contrary examples, with evidence that refutes the rule. So far there's no takers, so the rule stands (until such time as the scientists prove me wrong).
This would be similar to Newton's law of gravity being rewritten by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Gravity is not an ordinary force but a property of space-time geometry. The apple is not being pulled down by the mass of the planet. Its fall causes a gravitational wave and is pushed down by causing a ripple in the space-time continuum. So, there goes Newton's law out of the window.
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
Viv, you are getting warmer and warmer. You're nearly there.
Viv: it would require the complete knowledge of all life everywhere for all of time.
Here you are talking of God, don't you know?
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
Not even one example? Not even a little one? Well, my rule stands then. Let's leave God out of the equation for the moment. This is the way nature works, whether you like it or not. In actual fact, my rule can be viewed as a law. A "law" implies a statement of order and relation in nature that has been found to be invariable under the same conditions (e.g., the law of gravitation). See Webster.
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405
Origin of Life
by cofty inin recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.
there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.
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Vidqun
Viv, my rule says: Life begets life. Life brings forth life. That's the evidence before me. Please, would you be so kind as to let me know of any example, where that is not the case. Thank you in anticipation.