Hughes wrote:I agree it's the best hypothesis if the popular models for how the fossil record were formed are accurate. I don't think they are.
About abiogenesis, and the point was made that this particular scientist simulated the actual conditions on the earth. Now if that were the case, why is it that he had to add each element in a specific order to make his experiment work? It seems to me that the conditions of the earth aren't ever perfect, and more than often are violent and not friendly at all to life, let alone a fragile beginning of life.
And as Stephen Meyer points out the bigger issue is, "Nevertheless, this work does nothing to address the much more acute problem of explaining how the nucleotide bases in DNA or RNA acquired their specific information-rich arrangements..."
Hughes,
I am not sure if you are really as ill informed as you seem, supremely gullible, or if you are just amusing yourself. Since I don't know which it is, I am going to provide you with a quick summary, off the top of my head and without specific references, to work related to abiogenesis that has been done with RNA molecules.
There is a lot of recent work in this area, but since you seem to be high centered on "information", I will try to explain to you how this chemical information can come about in without 'intelligence'.
Here is a brief overview:
Individual molecules of RNA (monomers) have been shown to form spontaneously on certain kinds of clay substrates from chemicals that were readily available on the primordial Earth, and under conditions of temperature, pressure, pH and radiation flux that prevailed at the time. These monomers, when mixed together under the proper conditions of temperature, salinity, and pH, (again under conditions with existed for millions of years on Earth) will chemically bind together in specific ways to form short chains (or oligomers).
Now comes the interesting part. When these oligomers are mixed with more monomers, they react to form certain stable small polymers. When one analyses the resulting mixtures, they find that the most chemically stable forms tend to dominate in the mixture. These "successful" forms are the ones that are more likely to increase their relative concentration in the mixtures when new monomer material is added.
Did you get that? Chemical competition and "survival of the fittest" under conditions that existed on primordial Earth.
According to your definition, these stable short polymers carried "information". That is, they were able to find and react with new monomers as they became available in the mixture in order to grow, usually at the expense of less stable or less favored forms. If one changed the "environment" in the mixture (more of one type of monomer as "feed" than another, for example) then guess what - adaptation occurred. A new most stable structure, one more able to survive and grow in the new environment, became dominant.
And when other conditions changed (pH, overall monomer concentration, salt concentration, etc.,) without adding more monomer, new more stable forms were often built from the materials already present and at the expense of the forms less stable under the new conditions
Stephen Meyer has been wholly discredited in his assertions of the type you quote. His statements are mainly nonsense, and no mainstream scientist takes him seriously.\\
I just showed you how these RNA sequences acquired their "information rich arrangement", and it was done in a flask with chemicals. The information outcome (information generated) was dependent on what was available for the growing oligomers to "feed' upon. The conditions in this single laboratory flask existed in millions of locations for millions of years on the primordial Earth. Under these circumstances, primitive life was pretty much assured and abiogenesis (life from chemical reactions) may well have occurred thousands upon thousands of times at different times and dfferent locations.
When I have a little more time, perhaps I can flesh this out for you with some detail and references. Besides the story of the "information" molecules, micelles (precursors to primitive cell walls) and amino acids (precursors to proteins) have also been shown to form spontaneously under conditions that existed on the primordial Earth.
These also carry "information" according to your definition. For example, successful cell walls must pass certain kinds of molecules and exclude others (micelles do this naturally). Specific stable amino acid sequences perform all kinds of catalytic and structural tasks in living systems. This is not supernatural magic. It is just chemistry - plain and simple.