<story><title>Scientists discover new “origins of life” chemical reactions</title><url>https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2022/20220728-krishnamurthy-origins-of-life-chemical-reactions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmbyrro</author><text>&amp;gt; we can be pretty sure it’s the result of random mumbling&lt;p&gt;If you throw construction materials up 1 quadrillion times, how many times can they randomly fall in the form of a house?&lt;p&gt;My response is zero. Building a house is not a product of randomness, it&amp;#x27;s a product of intelligence and will.&lt;p&gt;Life also can&amp;#x27;t be a product of randomness. There&amp;#x27;s some intelligence and will going on in nature&amp;#x27;s laws to make life happen.</text></item><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>Is that really a staggering gap? The nucleotides jumble together until they randomly hit a config that leads to a pattern that leads to more of that config. We don’t know what that path is exactly but we can be pretty sure it’s the result of random mumbling through a series of random searches in an organic chemistry space.&lt;p&gt;Computers don’t arise randomly (without annoying semantic arguments).</text></item><item><author>Calavar</author><text>I have always felt that applying the label &amp;quot;origins of life&amp;quot; research on amino acid&amp;#x2F;nucleic acid synthesis is extremely misleading.&lt;p&gt;An analogy would be writing an article about the natural abundance of silicon on beaches and calling it &amp;quot;how computers are made.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We have a decent idea of how the first nucleic acids may have been synthesized, and we have a decent framework for how life evolved from protobiont to prokaryote to eukaryote to multicellular organisms. But there is an absolutely staggering gap between the synthesis of individual nucleotides and the synthesis of the first RNA replicase that we know nearly nothing about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wussboy</author><text>It will never form a house. But it doesn&amp;#x27;t need to, and expecting it to is a misunderstanding of evolutionary processes.&lt;p&gt;What it needs to form is any kind of a shelter that is better than not a shelter. A 4x8 sheet of plywood that happens to lean against a brick forming a roof is all that is required for a first house.&lt;p&gt;Life is a product of randomness. There is no intelligence or will going on in nature&amp;#x27;s laws. Neither of those things are required.</text></comment>
<story><title>Scientists discover new “origins of life” chemical reactions</title><url>https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2022/20220728-krishnamurthy-origins-of-life-chemical-reactions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmbyrro</author><text>&amp;gt; we can be pretty sure it’s the result of random mumbling&lt;p&gt;If you throw construction materials up 1 quadrillion times, how many times can they randomly fall in the form of a house?&lt;p&gt;My response is zero. Building a house is not a product of randomness, it&amp;#x27;s a product of intelligence and will.&lt;p&gt;Life also can&amp;#x27;t be a product of randomness. There&amp;#x27;s some intelligence and will going on in nature&amp;#x27;s laws to make life happen.</text></item><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>Is that really a staggering gap? The nucleotides jumble together until they randomly hit a config that leads to a pattern that leads to more of that config. We don’t know what that path is exactly but we can be pretty sure it’s the result of random mumbling through a series of random searches in an organic chemistry space.&lt;p&gt;Computers don’t arise randomly (without annoying semantic arguments).</text></item><item><author>Calavar</author><text>I have always felt that applying the label &amp;quot;origins of life&amp;quot; research on amino acid&amp;#x2F;nucleic acid synthesis is extremely misleading.&lt;p&gt;An analogy would be writing an article about the natural abundance of silicon on beaches and calling it &amp;quot;how computers are made.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We have a decent idea of how the first nucleic acids may have been synthesized, and we have a decent framework for how life evolved from protobiont to prokaryote to eukaryote to multicellular organisms. But there is an absolutely staggering gap between the synthesis of individual nucleotides and the synthesis of the first RNA replicase that we know nearly nothing about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oneoff786</author><text>That’s my point. Organic chemistry is not like your construction materials (or silicon computers). The organic chem functionality for nucleotides to begin organizing into repeating patterns exists. We know it does. And while we might not know the exact reactions that it took, they are highly likely to exist, and were arrived upon randomly.&lt;p&gt;If you arrange your biological soup a large number of times randomly, you will eventually land on a pattern that causes other nucleotides to arrange in a similar or improved pattern around it.&lt;p&gt;Not too dissimilar from thinking about the creation of specific atoms through various astronomical processes.&lt;p&gt;Even if you need to believe in god for some reason, it’s not incompatible with god defining the organic chemical reactions that enabled life to form via random interactions of nucleotides until they happened to land on god’s lucky number</text></comment>