Abiogenesis News - Creationism's Favourite God-Shaped Gap Just Got Smaller Again

“Protocells” containing bubble-like compartments formed spontaneously on a mineral-like and encapsulated fluorescent dye. This could have been what happened 3.8 billion years ago when cells first began to form.

Image: Karolina Spustova.

Evidence That Earth’s First Cells Could Have Made Specialized Compartments

No wonder Creationists often come across as paranoid. At times it must feel as though their favourite dogmas and god-shaped gaps are under siege by science and constantly in danger of being overthrown or closed altogether, like so many former gaps in which they sat their favourite god(s); all found to be empty when science shone a light in them.

One of their favourites, and often their only fall-back position, is that abiogenesis hasn't been explained by science, and that easily becomes a claim that it can't be explained without resort to magic by a magic man because living things contain special god-magic called 'life' that can't be identified or even explained.

Then along comes another paper, like this one from scientists at the University of Oslo, published by the Biophysics Society, that chips away a little more at this dogma, by showing not only how simple cells got started but by showing how 'life' is simply chemical and physical processes, all understandable as properties of matter, with no magic involved.

This paper is yet another in a long line of papers all reducing the size of creationism's god-shaped abiogenesis gap, and deals with how proto-cells became internally organised, in this case, with the formation of 'bubbles' or vacuoles that are a fundamental part of living cells today.

The Biophysical Society press release explains:

Termite Gut Microbes Could Aid Biofuel Production

Microbes in the guts of certain termite species could aid in the production of biofuel.

Credit: ABS Natural History/Shutterstock.com

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Termite gut microbes

Credit: mantismundi

Termite gut microbes could aid biofuel production - American Chemical Society

Another example today of why maintaining biodiversity on Earth may be vitally important to ours and the planet's survival. A microbe in the gut of termites could hold the key to producing biofuels from sustainable plant sources.

Termites are incapable on their own of digesting cellulose and the other main structural material of the wood and tough plant matter they feed on - lignin. Instead, they are entirely dependent on a diverse population of bacteria and protozoa that live symbiotically in their gut and which do the digestion for them. Very many of these organisms are unique to the guts of termites.

Now scientists at Toulouse Biotechnology Institute, TBI, Université de Toulouse, France with colleagues from the Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere, Kyoto University, Japan, and the Laboratory of Food Chemistry, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, have shown that these organisms from the guts of four species of termite, Nasutitermes ephratae, N. lujae, Microcerotermes parvus, and Termes hospes, can turn wheat straw into a useable biofuel.

The findings were published a few days ago in the American Chemical Society's journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, regrettably behind a firewall and the ACS refuse permission to reprint even the abstract, which can, be read here. However, the ACS News Service press release gives full details:

Malevolent Design News - How SARS-CoV-2 Was Designed to Kill Us

COVID-19 coronavirus spike protein

Credit: Alexandra C. Walls, Young-Jun Park, David Veesler
Source: University of Washington Medicine News

Research exposes new vulnerability in SARS-CoV-2 - Northwestern Now

Followers of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer must be awestruck by the sheer brilliance of its latest weapon of mass destruction - the modified coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes Covid-19. According to Johns Hopkins University, to date, this virus has infected 20,318,420 people world-wide and killed 742,048. In the USA, it has infected 5,141,879 and killed 164,545. The world-wide pandemic has caused economies to collapsed and major business to be ruined as governments impose lockdowns in a desperate battle to slow its spread.

Now, two research scientists from Northwestern University, Illinois, USA, have shown just how thorough this putative designer would have to have been to make the virus the 'success' it is. They have shown that the virus 'spike' proteins have a positively charged are just a few nanometers away from the actual binding site with which the virus binds to the protein ACE2, on the cell surface, fitting into it like a key into a lock. This forms a strong electrostatic bond with a negative area on the ACE2 protein, so helping the virus bind to the cell and prise open an entrance for it to inject its RNA contents into the cell.

Building Life's Building Blocks

Researchers have designed a synthetic small protein that wraps around a metal core composed of iron and sulfur. This protein can be repeatedly charged and discharged, allowing it to shuttle electrons within a cell. Such peptides may have existed at the dawn of life, moving electrons in early metabolic cycles.

Image: Vikas Nanda
Source: Rutgers Today

Rutgers Scientists Identify Protein that May Have Existed When Life Began | Rutgers Today

Researchers at Rutgers University have found perhaps the only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts may have existed when life began.

It has long been postulated that life may have begun on iron and sulphur-containing rocks in sea water and that these metals, bound to short peptide chains could have acted as catalysts for simple metabolic processes, long before RNA, DNA and bigger, more complex proteins evolved.

The team used computer modelling to design a short, 12-amino acid peptide for testing. This one had just two different amino acid from the 20 of which larger proteins are made. Being short and simple, it could easily have arisen spontaneously and the metal cluster at the heart of the catalyst are similar to those found in in the oceans on early Earth when life arose.

Laboratory Abiogenesis Observed?

Library synthesis and the mechanism of self-replication.

For description, see original source.

Diversification of self-replicating molecules - Nature Chemistry

The last three years have been dreadful for those who run the creationism industry, but this could be some of the worst news imaginable for them and their willing dupes, and it was only 4 days into the new year when it was published. Scientists led by Jan W. Sadownik at the Centre for Systems Chemistry, Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, believe they may have shown how self-replicating structures could have arisen spontaneously.

This is bound to result in hysterical denialism in creationist circles because it is an indispensable article of faith that life could not possibly have come from non-life so a magician must have made it happen. To a creationist, 'life' is of course some ill-defined or undefined magic ingredient that sets living things apart from non-living things and enables them to do things that non-living things don't do, such as reproducing. To anyone who understands basic biology however, living things are simply things that self-replicate. All the chemistry which goes on to use energy to resist the tendency to disorder is simply a means to that end.

Creationist Nightmare Approaches

Chemists claim to have solved riddle of how life began on Earth

The creationist nightmare scenario came a little closer a couple of days ago when a team of scientists published a paper in the Journal of Nature Chemistry, demonstrating that the three chemical precursors for building the basic components of a cell - RNA, lipids and proteins - can all be built by the same chemical process.

The nightmare scenario for creationists is of course the closure of one of the few remaining gaps in which they arbitrarily sit their favourite god and claim this proves its existence. This transparently circular reasoning and deliberate use of the false dichotomy fallacy is also a major plank in the under cover, pseudoscientific form of creationism, intelligent (sic) design. The belief seems to be that, if they can find something science can't currently explain then the only alternative explanation on offer is that their imaginary invisible friend did it. In normal life this form of argument would be seen as laughingly childish but religion has managed to get away with it for centuries.