Creationist Nightmares - Abiogenesis.

Abiogenesis:

Noun: technical term for spontaneous generation.

Origin: late 19th century: from a 'not' + Greek bios 'life' + genesis

So, basically, 'abiogenesis' refers to the spontaneous generation of life from non life. I have previously blogged on the definition (or lack thereof) of 'life' in What Is Life? which, interestingly and maybe significantly, no creationist has yet been able to answer, nor to refute my biological definition of life as localised entropy reduction.

What creationists insist on trying to insert into the definition is some form or magic ingredient called 'life' which is always left intentionally vague and ill-defined. Of course, from a biologists perspective, all that is necessary is to define 'abiogenesis' as the origin of replicators since the process of evolution can take it from there. 'Life', for a biologist, is merely shorthand for metabolism, which is necessary in complex systems for reducing the local entropy by increasing it elsewhere.

Another Creationist Lie Refuted By Science

Early bioenergetic evolution

Here's another one of those scientific papers that creation pseudoscience frauds must dread because it deals with another of their mysterious 'beginnings', abiogenesis.

Beginnings are such things as the Big Bang, the origins of morality and abiogenesis, or, as creationists like to call it, life from no-life. These are where they can fool those ignorant of science that the beginning must have had a magic cause because there couldn't have been something before it so, to the scientifically illiterate (i.e. creationists), it looks like getting

Creationism in Crisis - Signs of Life on an Exoplanet 120 Million Lightyears Away.

This illustration shows what exoplanet K2-18 b could look like based on science data. K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 in the habitable zone and lies 120 light years from Earth.
In this illustration, the exoplanet K2-18 c is shown between K2-18 b and its star.

Nikku Madhusudhan (IoA)/NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18 b | NASA

Abiogenesis, like the conditions that produced the Big Bang, is one of creationism's favourite gaps in which they try to fit their ever-shrinking little god and play their false dichotomy fallacy - if science can't explain it, "God did it!".

That ploy depends for its success of a couple of things, not the least of which are scientific illiteracy and cultural chauvinism of their target dupes. Creationists, while telling their targets that science can't explain how abiogenesis occurred, then pretend they know anyway and have calculated the probability of it. Of course, without knowing the precise conditions and chain of events, it is impossible to do that calculation, but nevertheless, creationist frauds will confidently proclaim it to be infinitesimally small.

However, if the precise mechanism were known, and the conditions could be replicated (temperature, pressure, catalysts, chemicals and time) the mechanism would not be impossible, it would be inevitable (i.e., certainty) since it is a basic principle of chemistry that if the conditions are right, a reaction will occur. No ifs or buts, it will occur since chemical reactions are not governed by laws of probability but by laws of physics. No chemist has ever needed to set up ten thousand test tubes to ensure at least one will produce the expected result. He/she would get ten thousand identical results.

But now, as scientists improve their ability to detect and examine the atmosphere of distant exoplanets orbiting other suns in the galaxy, so they are improving their ability to detect the inevitable signs of life on those planets and many people think it is only a matter of time before we have strong evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

Abiogenesis News - Closing Creationism's Favourite Gap On Their Ever-Shrinking Little God

Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park

Credit: iStock / tomolson54

Hot Spring in Yellowstone National Park.

Credit: iStock / tomolson54

Compound vital for all life likely played a role in life’s origin | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Abiogenesis is the gap creationists prefer to shoehorn their ever-shrinking little god into because they feel safer placing it there, believing that they have an unarguable claim that 'you can't get life from non-life'. Hilariously, you can sow confusion in their smug certainty in two simple ways:

1. Ask them to define 'life' and state whether it is a substance, a process or something else, because it only takes a moment's thought to realise 'life' is what we call the metabolic processes that organic molecules perform, so is simply the laws of chemistry and physics in operation. There is no magic ingredient needed.
2. Ask them what happens when the non-living food they eat becomes living tissues during the processes of digestion and assimilation if it is 'impossible'?

Their claim is nonsense of course; it's simply slogan delivered in response to trigger words which creationists no more understand than a parrot understands the meaning of the words it squawks.

There is nothing in the laws of chemistry or physics that makes abiogenesis impossible; given the right conditions there is no reason the inorganic chemicals present on the early Earth couldn't build more complex molecules or why those molecules couldn't perform the necessary processes to grow, repair and replicate. And once replication is possible, then selection would have been inevitable, and with selection, the processes which performed best would inevitably produce more copies.

Of course this can't be replicated easily in a laboratory because what no laboratory process can replicate is the long period of time, possibly millions of years, the process had on the early Earth, but what scientists can do is show that essential molecules to kick-start the processes could have arisen on the early Earth in the conditions that pertained then.

This is exactly what a team from University College London have shown in respect of a molecule which is the functional unit of one of the basic enzymes involved - Coenzyme A. The molecule is pantetheine. In earlier studies, pantetheine failed to be produced leading some to think that it would not have formed on early Earth and would therefore be absent and unable to play its essential role in metabolism.

Molecular structure of pantetheine

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:

Abiogenesis News - Self Organising Organic Molecules Add Another Possibility to The Theory of Abiogenesis

A new model describes the self-organization of catalysts involved in metabolic cycles. Different species of catalysts (represented by different colors) form clusters and can chase each other.

© MPI-DS / LMP

Fig. 4: Oscillatory dynamics for an odd number of species with chasing cross-interactions.

A schematic representation of the oscillatory dynamics (left), snapshots of molecular dynamics simulations (middle, see also Supplementary Movie 8), and a diagram of the corresponding species interactions and pairing (right) are shown side by side. Here, dashed and dotted lines represent respectively the pairs on the left and right of the schematic representation. The eigenvalues of the system are as in Fig. 3b, but now Re(λ)<Im(λ) for the most unstable conjugate pair, so that the dynamics of the system are oscillatory.

Ouazan-Reboul, V., Agudo-Canalejo, J. & Golestanian, R. (2023).

Exploring the origins of life | Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization

Creationists would have us believe that science can't explain how 'life' arose from 'non-life', as though 'life' is some magical, mysterious substance, which, when added to inorganic chemicals, turns them into organic, living, substances. whereas of course, 'life' is simply a term for the active metabolic processes that resist entropy by using the energy stored in organic molecules, involving nothing more than the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics. That energy ultimately comes from the sun via photosynthesis, or, more rarely, geothermal energy via chemosynthesis.

What is life?

The question for science then, is how did inorganic molecules become organised in such a way that they can carry out these metabolic processes, and for that there is almost an embarrassment of explanations, most of which require conditions and time that would be impossible to replicate in a laboratory.

For a plausible ten-step process towards abiogenesis, see: Perfectly Plausible Abiogenesis.

And now to add more to the embarrassment of riches that is the growing science of abiogenesis, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS), Göttingen, Germany have shown in two studies that catalytic molecules can form metabolically active clusters by creating and following concentration gradients.

As explained in an MPI-DS news release:

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Life and the Genetic Code.

Genetic information is stored as long, complex sequences of the four different bases in DNA: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). Triplets of these bases are interpreted by the genetic machinery as instructions to add a certain amino acid to a protein.

Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus

Did life evolve more than once? Researchers are closing in on an answer

By way of an introduction to this article on abiogenesis, I'm going to try to dispel the common, but evidence-free claim from creationists that the genetic code is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent designer.

This is, of course, nothing but the usual argument from ignorant incredulity and a false dichotomy fallacy - I don't know enough, I can't be bothered to learn, and I can't imagine how something could have arisen naturally, so God did it - and of course it must be the locally popular god because there are only two possibilities; the current science or the local god. It's an argument that demonstrates better than most the scientific illiteracy, intellectual bankruptcy and cultural chauvinism of creationism.

First, I look at the genetic codes and how it could have evolved naturally, without a supernatural magician making chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, or making the highly improbable happen - as though the notion of an undetectable entity existing outside space and time but able to influence things inside space and time makes any sense.

This comes in two forms: a conversation with an AI chat bot, and the book, Life Ascending by Nick Lane.

Firstly, a conversation with ChatGPT3:

How Self-Replicating RNA Got Made - Naturally

A hydrothermal vent on the Niua underwater volcano in the Lau Basin, southwest Pacific Ocean. The sort of place abiogenesis could have happened.

Chemical evolution in a tiny Gulf Stream - LMU Munich

I hate to say, "I told you so!", but... I told you so!

Readers of my books and blog-posts may remember how I elaborated on the ten-step process, proposed by Nick Lane and Michael Le Page in New Scientist in 2009, to explain how abiogenesis could have come about, in my blog-post Perfectly Plausible Abiogenesis, and in my popular book What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You, in which I wrote:

Evolution News - Closing Creationism's Abiogenesis God-Shaped Gap

Early Earth (Artist's impression)

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Cysteine synthesis was a key step in the origin of life | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Abiogenesis is the creation industry's favourite fall-back gap for when they find the evidence for evolution irrefutable and overwhelming. Science is then challenged to reproduce a fully functional complex cell in a laboratory, starting out with a few raw chemicals.

What they've been conditioned to believe is that any current gap in our scientific knowledge will, unlike all the previous gaps, never be closed, so it must be done by a god, notwithstanding the absurd false dichotomy in that argument.

So, these instances of their abiogenesis god-shaped gap shrinking considerably under scientific scrutiny is bound to produce hand-waving denialism in even the hardiest of creationists. It is, of course just another small step by science toward a comprehensive understanding of how self-replicating, entropy-managing, free-living collections of chemicals in a bag, started evolving into today's amazing biodiversity.

Perfectly Plausible Abiogenesis

I get more than a little bit bored with almost every debate with creationists eventually, and often very quickly, coming down to a demand that we explain abiogenesis, or more likely an assertion that it can't be explained because it's 'impossible'.

Then comes the parrot squawk, "you can't get life from non-life", as though any of them could define this 'life' thing.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would both give a puff for my book, What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang to You and put on record a perfectly plausible explanation for how abiogenesis could have happened. Note, it's not meant to be an account of how it actually happened, just how it could have happened, to refute creationist claims that it is impossible.

If any creationists wishes to substantiate that claim, please feel free to go through the following ten steps and say which laws of chemistry and/or physics would make one or more of them impossible. If you can't, clearly, it is not impossible.

Creationism's Abiogenesis God-Shaped Gap Just Got Smaller

From the mixture of all four nucleobases, A:T pairs emerged at about 100 degrees Celsius and G:C pairs formed at 200 degrees Celsius.

Credit: Ruđer Bošković Institute, Ivan Halasz

DESY News: Searching for the chemistry of life - Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

It's been one of those awful weeks for Creationists again.

Not only did we have those lovely wasps embedded in 25-million-year-old amber, and then their beloved Covidiot In Chief, Donald Trump being laid low with the virus he had pronounced to be a hoax and a mild illness that would all be over by April, but now we have another shovel-full thrown into their favourite god-shaped hole, abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is the current fall-back of every creationist who runs out of arguments against evolution, and to which they cling like a fool to a deck-chair in the face of an on-rushing tsunami.

This time we have news that a team led by Ivan Halasz from the Ruđer Bošković Institute and Ernest Meštrović from the pharmaceutical company Xellia have shown just how easy it must have been to create DNA by perfectly natural processes in conditions which would have been found on the early Earth. Their findings were published a few days ago in the journal Chemical Communications, regrettably behind a paywall. However, the news release from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), A Research Centre of the Helmholtz Association, explains the problem and the team's findings:

Abiogenesis News - That God-Shaped Gap Just Keeps On Shrinking

Scripps Research scientists reveal how first cells could have formed on Earth | Scripps Research

It's been a bad week so far for creationists. Coming so soon after scientist announced they had solved the 'chirality problem, is news that another team have shown how simple cells could plausibly have formed in the pre-biotic conditions that pertained on early Earth.

Creationists are generally black & white thinkers who value certainty above truth, so, for them there is no such thing as a plausible explanation; either something is proven beyond doubt, even passing an especially impossible standard of evidence, or it is wrong (so God did it!).

And one of their 'certainties' is their absolute faith in the slogan, "You can't get life from non-life!", which is chanted like a protective mantra in any debate about evolution (conveniently switching the debate from evolution to what they think is safer ground, abiogenesis). But ask them to define 'life' in such a way that you can test for it to tell if something is alive or not, or to explain how the non-living food they eat gets converted into living tissues, if that's impossible, and you're likely to get an ad hominem or an indignant, condescending flounce and a swift termination of the conversation.

It is an essential ingredient of creationism that the belief that abiogenesis is 'impossible' be maintained as the last refuge for their ever-shrinking creator god to be located in, as all the other gaps are closed to it.

So, having committed themselves to the certainty that abiogenesis is 'impossible', they have unwittingly committed themselves to accepting that any plausible process which can be shown to be viable, refutes the notion of impossibility and everything they conclude from it. So, their next step is the intellectually bankrupt technique of moving the goal-posts or demanding scientist provide an impossible standard of evidence such as showing it happening - billions of years ago. Never will they concede that evidence of plausibility refutes the claim of impossibility because, to a black & white thinker, plausibility doesn't give enough certainty, so can be dismissed until proven.

So, we can expect that predictable display of intellectual bankruptcy in response to the news that scientists at the Scripps Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA have discovered a plausible mechanism for the formation of simple self-replicating cells in the prebiotic conditions that pertained on early Earth.

Their findings are published in the Cell Press journal Chem and are the subject of a Cripps Institute press release:

Abiogenesis News - Going! Going! Gone! - How Creationism Favourite Gap Just Got Smaller

Geothermal hot spring in Haukadalur Valley, Iceland

ancient hot springs - Press Office - Newcastle University

Hardly any debate about evolution with a creationist will go more than a few exchanges before the creationist gives up trying the traditional fallacies and avoidance tactics and falls back onto ground he or she feels safer on - abiogenesis - with the demand that you explain how the first cell arose fully developed, with the parrot squawk assertion that 'you can't get life from non-life'.

But ask them to define 'life' and they'll break off the debate because it's a term creationists think involves something that science can't explain, but they've no idea what it is or why it should present science with a problem. Ask them to explain how dead food becomes living tissue through the process of digestion and metabolism, if it's impossible, and you probably won't hear from them again.

The gap creationists are trying to shoehorn their favourite creator god into is what they've been programmed to believe is unclosable by science, so it must have been done by the locally popular god. They will of course be unaware of the fallacy of the false dichotomy because it's probably what someone fooled them with, so they just assume it'll work on everyone else.

Abiogenesis News - Urea May Have Been The Precursor to Life.

Potential witness to the origins of life: a urea dimer.

Visualisations: Adobe Stock / Montage

Why urea may have been the gateway to life | ETH Zurich

Artist's impression of the pre-biotic Earth.

A new technique for observing chemical reactions with an extremely high temporal resolution has enabled Swiss scientists working at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (ETH Zürich) and Geneva University to see what happens when urea in water is subject to ionizing radiation - the conditions that would have existed on pre-biotic Earth, billions of years ago.

The dominant theory explaining abiogenesis is that it took place around deep ocean hydrothermal vents, or black smokers, but a rival theory, which harks back to Darwin's 'warm little pond', is that it could have occurred in shallow pools subjected to ionizing radiation from the sun. The team's observation of how urea reacts lends support to the latter theory.

Urea is a highly reactive molecule that exists in concentrated solutions as a dimer (two molecules chemically bonded). The researchers observed that ionizing radiation causes a hydrogen ion (i.e., a proton, which carries a positive charge) to move from one molecule in the dimer to the other, creating a negatively charged urea^- radical from one molecule and a protonated urea⁺ molecule from the other. The former is highly reactive and can then form malonic acid - believed to be the first step in creating larger molecules such as RNA. This happens so fast (in about 1 femtosecond, or 150 billionths of a second) that it effectively monopolizes the dimer and prevents other chemical reactions from occurring, so favouring the formation of malonic acid.

The details are given in the ETH Zürich press release:

Refuting Intelligent Design Creationism

Lee Thomas Wimberley, MD.
CDesign Proponentsist

On the Emergence of Life | Lee T. Wimberley, MD.

First a little background.

Apparently, Lee Thomas Wimberly, MD, is highly regarded in creationist circles in the social media, though not in scientific circles, where he appears to be a complete unknown. He has written what he believes is a critique of evolution and what he calls 'evolutionists'.

He has a medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine and works as an internist associated with several hospitals in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. He appears to have no background in biological research or scientific research of any kind. He is an 'intelligent design' advocate, in other words, he is a creationist. As his record in the social media shows, he is a Bible-literalist Young Earth Creationist who believes in Noah's Ark, and a 6000 year-old Earth.

Having asked on Twitter why evolution can't explain the origin of life, as though demanding a scientific explanation for one thing - evolution - explain another - abiogenesis - is some sort of rebuttal of the ToE, and having conspicuously ignored the proffered ten-step process by which abiogenesis could very plausibly have happened, Wimberly challenged me to read and comment on his blog.

These tweets are my response, numbered to overcome the limited number of permissible characters on Twitter.

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.

Evolution News - Closing Creationism's God-Shaped Gap

Models for potential precursors of cells endure simulated early-Earth conditions | Eberly College of Science

Another shovel-full of science has just been thrown into Creationism's favourite God-shaped gap - abiogenesis - by a bunch of scientists from Penn State University Eberley College of Science.

The abiogenesis question is the increasingly-used last resort of Creationists who can no longer mount a serious challenge to the science of evolution. Never slow to use a dishonest false dichotomy fallacy, they challenge scientists to explain how the first 'life' assembled without the intervention of a magic creator, and to replicate it in a laboratory - as though the ultimate proof of a scientific theory is to replicate it in a laboratory, regardless of the fact that the theory might involve a whole planet or conditions only found near hydrothermal vents in the ocean abyss, and millions of years!

But that God-shaped gap just got smaller, as it has been doing now for several decades, as chemists, physicists and geologists discover more about the conditions on the early Earth when living systems first arose, and about the chemical and physical processes that were possible, even likely under those conditions.

Evolution News - Evolution Before Abiogenesis

Fig. 1.
Templated ligation of random sequence DNA 12-mers. (A) Before cells evolved, the first ribozymes were thought to perform basic cell functions. In the exponentially vast sequence space, spontaneous emergence of a functional ribozyme is highly unlikely, therefore preselection mechanisms were likely necessary. (B) In our experiment, DNA strands hybridize at low temperatures to form three-dimensional complexes that can be ligated and preserved in the high temperature dissociation steps. The system self-selects for sequences with specific ligation site motifs as well as for strands that continue acting as templates. Hairpin sequences are therefore suppressed. (C) Concentration analysis shows progressively longer strands emerging after multiple temperature cycles. The inset (A-red, T-blue) shows that, although 12-mers (88,009 strands) have essentially random sequences (white), various sequence patterns emerge in longer strands (60-mers, 235,913 strands analyzed). (D) Samples subjected to different number (0 to 1,000) of temperature cycles between 75 °C and 33 °C. Concentration quantification is done on PAGE with SYBR poststained DNA.

© 2021 The authors

Did Darwinian evolution begin before life itself? | News - LMU München

News today that research physicists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany (LMU) may have solved one of the key questions relating to abiogenesis - how did order begin to emerge from the chaos of random organic chemicals? It appears that this was the result of Darwinian evolution of molecules!

In the words of the LMU New release:

Before life emerged on Earth, many physicochemical processes on our planet were highly chaotic. A plethora of small compounds, and polymers of varying lengths, made up of subunits (such as the bases found in DNA and RNA), were present in every conceivable combination. Before life-like chemical processes could emerge, the level of chaos in these systems had to be reduced. In a new study, LMU physicists led by Dieter Braun show that basic features of simple polymers, together with certain aspects of the prebiotic environment, can give rise to selection processes that reduce disorder.

In common with many researchers in this field, the LMU team placed abiogenesis in "narrow, water-filled chambers within porous volcanic rocks on the sea bottom", in other words in the porous rocks around deep ocean hydrothermal vents.

These studies showed that, in the presence of temperature differences and a convective phenomenon known as the Soret effect, RNA strands could locally be accumulated by several orders of magnitude in a length-dependent manner. “The problem is that the base sequences of the longer molecules that one obtains are totally chaotic“, says Braun. Evolved ribozymes (RNA-based enzymes) have a very specific base sequence that enable the molecules to fold into particular shapes, while the vast majority of oligomers formed on the Early Earth most probably had random sequences. “The total number of possible base sequences, known as the ‘sequence space’, is incredibly large,” says Patrick Kudella, first author of the new report. “This makes it practically impossible to assemble the complex structures characteristic of functional ribozymes or comparable molecules by a purely random process.” This led the LMU team to suspect that the extension of molecules to form larger ‘oligomers’ was subject to some sort of preselection mechanism.

'Missing Link' in Abiogenesis Found!

Scientists find potential 'missing link' in chemistry that led to life on Earth

You know, sometimes I get carried away and fantasise about creationist frauds like Ham, Comfort and Hovind hearing the tune Aproaching Menace by Neil Richardson as they read yet another scientific paper showing how science is closing in on one of their sacred dogmas - that only God can create life.

But then I come back to reality and remember that they don't do science and evidence, so none of this makes any difference to them. They'll still claim it's impossible, knowing they can rely on their willing dupes not to check just in case.

Only three days ago I reported here on the work of a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA who are homing in on one of the pre-biotic precursors of one of the fundamental cell processes. Just a day later we had this paper published in Nature Chemistry showing how another fundamental process could similarly have arisen pre-biotically. The process is that of phosphorylation, i.e, adding a phosphate group to three key components of cells.

Creationism in Crisis - Biochemists are Homing In On Abiogenesis

Deep-sea hydrothermal vent chimney from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Many new microbial genomes have been described from these environments.

Credit: Anna-Louise Reysenbach and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Did this chemical reaction create the building blocks of life on Earth?

Scheme 2 Some pathways for the proposed reaction network of formose intermediates and cyanamide based on the autocatalytic cycle proposed by Breslow³² and experiments herein. It is hypothesised that the formation of tetrose and pentose aminooxazolines via the addition of 2-NH2Ox with glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde (gray dashed arrows), respectively, is likely not the dominant pathway as originally hypothesised in Scheme 1. See ESI Table S3† for more proposed structures. Note, that although the Breslow autocatalytic cycle is shown for simplicity, the full reaction network is much more complex; see ref. 30, 41 and 42.

Tran, Quoc Phuong; Yi, Ruiqin; Fahrenbach, Albert C.(2023)

Stand by for another bout of petulant histrionics from creationists when biochemists and biophysicists finally work out how a self-replicating molecule could have arisen on Earth, then, through a process of evolution by natural selection, gradually improved its efficiency until free-living, self-replicating organisms emerged. The traditional anti-science rhetoric normally includes abusing the scientists, misrepresenting their findings, and claiming it proves intelligence was needed.

It is generally assumed that this process took place in deep ocean hydrothermal vents, or 'black smokers' where the right chemicals and catalysts were present with sources of energy in the form of geothermal heat, and a rich chemical soup of the basic ingredients needed. It is also assumed that the earliest forms of self-replicating organisms were RNA- based, and only became DNA-based later on. In fact, there is a school of thought that says living things are still essentially RNA-based, using DNA as a data store, since DNA is always transcribed into its RNA counterpart to be useful to a cell in transporting amino acids and producing proteins.

Whatever the final pathway turns out to have been, we can be sure it all started with a relatively simple, self-catalyzing molecule, that just needs a supply of the right raw materials to proceed, and there is a simple chemical reaction, known as the formose reaction, that we have known about since 1861 which fits that requirement. Basically, the formose reaction is where the molecule glycolaldehyde, given a supply of formaldehyde, will keep producing copies of itself and will only stop when the supply of formaldehyde runs out.

The following article by Quoc Phuong Tran a PhD Candidate in Prebiotic Chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. In it, he discusses this reaction and the role it could have played in abiogenesis: