Thursday, January 7, 2021

When Popular Mechanics is Dissing Your Evolution Theory You Know You Have Problems

Don’t Two Wrongs Make a Right?

We’ve long since lost track of how many times the RNA World hypotheses—which states that life originated from an RNA enzyme-genome combination rather than from DNA—failed only to be once again resurrected, but we do know this crazy idea will, for a long time to come, continue to be cited as “good solid” evidence for evolution. This despite new research which gives yet another reason for its failure.

There are big problems with the idea that life arose from a random assembly of DNA. Aside from the little problem of generating astronomical amounts of crucial information from, err, random mutations, the resulting DNA doesn’t do anything by itself. That is because proteins are needed to extract said information and do something with it.

So, evolutionists came up with the clever idea of using RNA instead of DNA, since RNA can both store genetic information and also do something with it. Of course, this idea still has that little problem of generating the information in the first place. Oh, also, there is precisely zero evidence of any “RNA World” organisms.

Now or ever.

There is no organism that does this. There is no organism that does anything like this. There is no controlled, laboratory, version of such a thing. There isn’t even a computer simulation of it, at least in any kind of detail.

Not only does this call the entire idea into question, it also raises another little problem that if there was this so-called RNA World, then it must have gone away at some point, and neatly transitioned into a DNA world, without leaving a trace. But aside from vague speculation, there is no compelling notion of how this would occur.

This is but a brief introduction to the problems one finds with the RNA World, that have led to its repeated downfall, before its repeated resurrections.

Now, this new research points out the rather inconvenient fact that RNA is too sticky:

But while RNA strands may be good at templating complementary strands, they are not so good at separating from these strands. Modern organisms make enzymes that can force twinned strands of RNA—or DNA—to go their separate ways, thus enabling replication, but it is unclear how this could have been done in a world where enzymes didn’t yet exist.

Amazingly enough, this story was picked up by, of all mags, Popular Mechanics.

Yup. You know you have problems with Popular Mechanics is dissing your evolutionary theory.

And while one might have thought that this rather fundamental problem would have disqualified the RNA World hypothesis a long time ago—RNA’s “stickiness” was not just discovered yesterday—it turns out that fundamental problems such as this tend to be openly discussed only when a replacement theory is at the ready.

And sure enough, since DNA didn’t work, and perhaps now we can finally say that RNA also didn’t work, perhaps the trick is to combine them. Don’t two wrongs make a right? And so, it is, the new research indeed proposes that life got going by using fancy chimeric molecular strands that are part DNA and part RNA.

Well, evolution dodged another bullet. But we think we can at least say that Alexander Oparin’s 1924 prediction that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon” hasn’t quite turned out right.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

20 comments:

  1. Hmm. The election data analysis has disappeared again.

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    1. Yes Dr. Hunter, where is the election blog series?

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    2. The vote is now over and it is time to unify.

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    3. Yes. Especially important now given the strife that has arisen. The series was too easily interpreted as political advocacy, which it was not.

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    4. Well good luck on unifying as Big Tech ramps up it's purge of Conservatives from social media. Parler the alternative to Twitter just had their app banned from the Google Play app store and Facebook just erased Walk Away and 500,000 followers. Welcome to 1984. Biden isn't even sworn in yet

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    5. Conservatives aren't being purged. Only those who advocate violence and subversion of the Constitution in pushing their hate-filled and divisive white supremacy agendas. Just so happens those disgusting views are only espoused by some (not all) Trump loving Conservatives.

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    6. False. #WalkAway and many other influential banned accounts were perfectly benign. They even tried to ban TechnoFog, a lawyer whose only crime was sharing declassified documents that made the Flynn prosecution look bad.

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  2. Just curious why you completely ignored the actual science story about a new promising hypothesis which involves DNA and RNA co-evolving. Instead you quote-mined one small piece of the story which has nothing to do with evolution, only abiogenesis.

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    1. But the previous theory was promising also. And the one before that. All the way back to 1924. Their problems are admitted only when the next "promising" theory arrives.

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    2. Religion drives anti-science propaganda, and it matters.

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    3. “Why did you make the post about this thing when I wanted you to make it about this other thing? Propaganda!”

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  3. No one can explain how either DNA or RNA could arise on their own and you accept as promising a hypothesis which has them co-evolving? Sounds sensible to me.

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    1. I'm sure the authors of the research would be happy to read your rebuttal paper explaining what exactly they got wrong.

      Prebiotic phosphorylation of 2-thiouridine provides either nucleotides or DNA building blocks via photoreduction

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    2. Why not address my comment instead of making an appeal to something else? I was not addressing any research, I was addressing why research into co-evolution should be any more promising than research into singular evolution? Evolution of any kind based on descent form a common source continually fails. Why would you expect this to be different simply because it involves a more demanding set of circumstances?

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  4. I would want to contact you both for ID-related questions and for career advice questions, but I don't find your e-mail adress anywhere. Could you please e-mail me at abathletic@gmail.com (or publish your own e-mail adress here as an answer, whatever you prefer).

    Thanks in advance.

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  5. Hi Cornelius...you once wrote an article about origin studies, I think it was related to the coronavirus. Did you delete it?

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  6. I was thinking the other day about a theroy that the Earth was shrouded in a sphere (canopy) of water. This was linked to a creation idea of how the earth was formed. If this is true and the "flood" was a result of this canopy being removed by a meteor and then contributed to dumping massive amounts of liquid hydrogen onto the earth then that protective layer kept the sons damaging and radioactive rays from aging our planet. Could this be the reason why our Earth appears to be so "old?" Also why people lived longer on the Earth prior to the "flood?"

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