On Monday, September 4, 2023 at 5:30:25 PM UTC-4, Gary Hurd wrote:
> On Monday, September 4, 2023 at 1:55:25 PM UTC-7,
peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > First off, let's give the alchemists of the middle ages their due: they
> > came up with a goodly number of useful things, including sulfuric acid,
> > which is essential to so many manufacturing processes.
> >
> > It is in that spirit that I refer to the following as belonging to the "alchemy of OOL":
> > the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953 and research in the intervening 70 years
> > to produce amino acids, nucleotides, lipid vesicles, sugars, etc. under primitive earth conditions.
> >
> > Peter Nyikos
> “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” – Charles Darwin “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” (John Murray, London, 1871) vol. 1, p. 3.
Is this a clueless attempt to read my mind?
If so, stay posted. You may be in for a surprise as to how far I am
from pronouncing it impossible. But it will take some serious, intensive
research in what I call "the biochemistry of OOL", perhaps 70 additional
years, to get to what I call the First Holy Grail of OOL. See my second post to this thread
for what I mean by that.
>
> My reading recommendations on the origin of life for people without college chemistry, are;
>
> Hazen, RM 2005 "Gen-e-sis" Washington DC: Joseph Henry Press
>
> Deamer, David W. 2011 “First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began” University of California Press.
Without getting into biochemistry, these will be like the things I read in my
adolescence which made me think that, to closely paraphrase Gould,
"Life is as inevitable as quartz" on a planet that has the bare essentials for it.
And, thinking of cells as "bits of the jelly-like substance called protoplasm", I envisioned
a process of making them that is very much like the alchemy of the middle ages,
only with modern chemicals and equipment.
I got two rude shocks in 1996: _Vital Dust_, by Nobel Laureate biochemist Christian deDuve,
who got only a bit further along in his theory than what has been accomplished in the last 70 years,
and then skipped all the way over to the biochemistry of life, which Athel pronounced as
being utterly different than the biochemistry of OOL.
The other, which confirmed my worst suspicions of deDuve's rhapsodic book of the genre
(though not on the lowly level) of those two books, was _LIfe_Itself_ by another Nobel Laureate
biochemist, Francis Crick. The book teaches basic biochemistry in a highly readable way
(unlike deDuve's) and then makes good on the words,
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available
to us now, could only state that in some sense, the
origin of life seems at the moment to be almost a miracle,
so many are the conditions which would have had to have
been satisfied to get it going."
--_Life Itself_, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
There are trolls whose knee-jerk reaction is to look at the date and then,
without a clue as to how little progress there has been since then,
will claim that those words are obsolete. They aren't.
> They are a bit dated, but are readable for people without much background study.
>
> If you have had a good background, First year college; Introduction to Chemistry, Second year; Organic Chemistry and at least one biochem or genetics course see;
>
> Deamer, David W. 2019 "Assembling Life: How can life begin on Earth and other habitable planets?" Oxford University Press.
Can you give me one reason why this does NOT belong to the Alchemy of OOL?
The description on Amazon.com strongly hints that it belongs squarely there,
except for the following highly anomalous bit:
"For instance, how did nonliving organic compounds assemble into the first forms of primitive cellular life?"
Short answer: they didn't. Life is the endpoint of vast detours in what I call
"the biochemistry of OOL." Small wonder you deleted everything I wrote about that in my OP.
I was originally planning to give readers some insight into research on "the biochemistry of OOL"
today, but it's getting late and I have some pressing commitments to my students
and my family, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, perhaps already the morning.
The titles of the other books you tout below sound at least as suspiciously irrelevant
as the one of Deamer.
>
> Hazen, RM 2019 "Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything" Norton and Co.
The reckless optimism reminds me of that of Cairn's-Smith on the magic of clays. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith
With the hindsight of decades, he comes across as a bit of a crank. The RNA nucleotides his clays
polymerized are almost surely evolutionary dead ends, like the proteinoids of Fox are known to be.
>
> Note: Bob Hazen thinks his 2019 book can be read by non-scientists. I doubt it.
> Nick Lane 2015 "The Vital Question" W. W. Norton & Company
Title reminiscent of _Vital Dust_, see above. How good is his understanding of the biochemistry of OOL?
> Nick Lane spent some pages on the differences between Archaea and Bacteria cell boundary chemistry, and mitochondria chemistry. That could hint at a single RNA/DNA life that diverged very early, and then hybridized. Very interesting idea!
I think Athel Cornish-Bowden would just call it naive, were he interested in discussing OOL.
But the smart money says he isn't interested, because he could burst the bubble of many here,
including yourself, on how much y'all think we understand of OOL.
And that's the last thing he wants to do.
>
> Nick Lane
> 2022 "Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death" W. W. Norton & Company
>
> In this book Professor Lane is focused on the chemistry of the Krebs Cycle (and its’ reverse) for the existence of life, and its’ origin. I did need to read a few sections more than once.
The Krebs cycle belongs to the biochemistry of life, not OOL, and you need to make a case
for the reverse cycle being relevant to that of OOL. Do you feel up to it?
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos