Finding answers for Factfinder

[he_who_is_nobody]

Today, a creationists posed to me these questions. I honestly do not know the answers to them. I am posting them here for a helping hand.

Please provide the scientific answers relative to your specific area of expertise: :

1- How did the DNA code originate?

2- How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

3- How did multicellular life come into existence?

4- How did peptide bonds occur in the prebiotic chemical soup of billions of years ago, when H2O destroys the bonding mechanism?

 

[Dustnite]

1- How did the DNA code originate?

I don't know. It's a fundamental problem of biology. However, no one else has this answer either and anyone who claims to know is most probably making a bald assertion.

2- How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Ask Nylonase bacteria, they figured it out recently.

3- How did multicellular life come into existence?

One, we know that multicellular life exists since it's evidenced. Two, this will be the same answer as number one but there are several hypotheses available given a cursory glance on wikipedia even.

4- How did peptide bonds occur in the prebiotic chemical soup of billions of years ago, when H2O destroys the bonding mechanism?

We don't know. Give scientists another few decades and they might figure it out.


This reeks of ID proponent to me and some of these questions have already been answered through recent experimentation. Btw, most of these questions are lifted from this campaign: http://creation.com/question-evolution

RationalWiki has a good breakdown on all of these except for the peptide question.

EDIT: Here's a cute one to throw back at him: Question Gravity and Question Creationism

 

[Collecemall]

Are any of those questions relevant to your area of expertise?

Even if all of those questions are answered with goddunnit it just means there is some really uninterested twit who started things rolling then got the fuck out of dodge and hasn't been seen since. But I suspect we don't know isn't sufficient to insert goddunnit. That answer has never been correct before why would they bet on it for these specific questions?

 

[Rumraket]

FactFinder sounds like Elshamah. Same inane questions. The fourth one really is trivial. The rate of synthesis was greater than the rate of degradation. Put proteins in water and they will slooooowly hydrolyse, so yes water hydrolyses proteins into amino acids. But that reaction is very slow. The tiniest catalyzation of peptide bond formation will outcompete hydrolyzation quickly.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Are any of those questions relevant to your area of expertise?

No. However, I do have answers to three of them, I was just to lazy to say them yesterday. They come from other users on this forum. Rumraket has also answered the fourth question.

1- How did the DNA code originate?

hackenslash[/url]"]Moving on to the 'genetic code', in DNA, we have the nucleobases Cytosine, Adenine, Guanine and Thymine (In RNA, thymine is replaced by uracil (U)). These are the digital states of DNA. We use only the initial letters in our treatment, CAGT. Further, they come in pairs, with C always pairing with G, and A always pairing with T (or with U in RNA).

From here, we can build up lots of 'words', in that when they pair in certain ordered sequences (no teleology here), they produce specific proteins, that go into building organisms (loosely). The point is that this is all just chemistry, while the code itself is our treatment of it. In other words, the map is not the terrain.

DNA is a code in precisely the same way that London is a map.

Please read that whole post for the full answer.

2- How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Rumraket[/url]"]Irreducible complexity is not a successful argument against evolution for reasons already stated in your three other threads.

In fact we have observed the origin of an irreducibly complex pathway for the utilization of citrate under aerobic conditions in Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment with E coli.

A gene duplication spawned a copy of the citrate transporter in vicinity of a regulatory element that is only active under aerobic conditions. This allows the cells to use citrate when oxygen is present, which they normally cannot do.

If you remove the duplicate gene, the cell can no longer use citrate with oxygen present. If you remove the regulatory element, the citrate transporter fails to activate when oxygen is present, and the cell cannot use citrate and will die if there is no other food available. So there you go, a two-component, irreducibly complex system that requires both components to be present to work. If you remove one of the components, the system stops working. So it is irreducibly complex and it evolved.

If it is irreducibly complex it can still evolve. In fact we expect that the evolutionary process will create irreducibly complex structures. Do you understand this? If evolution is true, there should be irreducibly complex structures in living organism.

3- How did multicellular life come into existence?

Inferno[/url]"]As for number eight, that has also been observed. In 1983, nonetheless.
Here's the citation: Boraas, M. E. 1983. Predator induced evolution in chemostat culture. EOS. Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. 64:1102.

A short explanation is the following:

Starting from single celled animals, each of which has the capability to reproduce there is no s@x in the sense that we think of the term. Selective pressure has been observed to convert single-cellular forms into multicellular forms. A case was observed in which a single celled form changed to multicellularity.
Boxhorn, a student of Boraas,writes:
Coloniality in Chlorella vulgaris
Boraas (1983) reported the induction of multicellularity in a strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa (since reclassified as C. vulgaris) by predation. He was growing the unicellular green alga in the first stage of a two stage continuous culture system as for food for a flagellate predator, Ochromonas sp., that was growing in the second stage. Due to the failure of a pump, flagellates washed back into the first stage. Within five days a colonial form of the Chlorella appeared. It rapidly came to dominate the culture. The colony size ranged from 4 cells to 32 cells. Eventually it stabilized at 8 cells. This colonial form has persisted in culture for about a decade. The new form has been keyed out using a number of algal taxonomic keys. They key out now as being in the genus Coelosphaerium, which is in a different family from Chlorella."

Thus, in less than 24 hours, all of Factfinder's questions have been answered.

 

[Grumpy Santa]

There is this experiment showing some peptide formation:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515001724

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Factfinder would like primary sources to answer his claims. I will supply them for the relevant questions.

1. The first question does not need a citation to primary literature. It is basically a semantic argument. As hackenslash pointed out, we label the chemistry found in nature so we can read it easier. That is the meaning behind the phrase "the map is not the terrain." The code in DNA is our map of the chemistry we see, it leaves out a lot of detail to make it useful in our every day use. Think of it as a topographic map. The contour lines found on it represent a three-dimensional shape on a two-dimensional plain, just like the letters in the DNA code represent the chemicals that make up life.
   
   
2. Blount, Zachary D.; Borland, Christina Z.; Lenski, Richard E. (2008). "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (23): 7899–906.
   
   
3. The citation is already in the quote.

Rumraket (or anyone in the know), is there primary literature for your answer to number four?

 

[Grumpy Santa]

Rumraket (or anyone in the know), is there primary literature for your answer to number four?

Wouldn't this count? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515001724

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Rumraket (or anyone in the know), is there primary literature for your answer to number four?

Wouldn't this count? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515001724

I did not say anything about your post because you already posted a link to the primary source. That is an answer to Factfinder's fourth question. A different one from Rumraket's, and goes to show that there could be multiple answers to any of these questions.

 

[Visaki]

I somehow don't have faith that Factfinder is actually looking for facts, rather I have a feeling he is looking for Gaps™

Thought I do find facts to be interesting

 

[Deleted member 619]

1. Entropy.
2. Entropy.
3. Entropy.
4. Entropy.

Hope that helps.

 

[Rumraket]

Factfinder would like primary sources to answer his claims. I will supply them for the relevant questions.

1. The first question does not need a citation to primary literature. It is basically a semantic argument. As hackenslash pointed out, we label the chemistry found in nature so we can read it easier. That is the meaning behind the phrase "the map is not the terrain." The code in DNA is our map of the chemistry we see, it leaves out a lot of detail to make it useful in our every day use. Think of it as a topographic map. The contour lines found on it represent a three-dimensional shape on a two-dimensional plain, just like the letters in the DNA code represent the chemicals that make up life.
   
   
2. Blount, Zachary D.; Borland, Christina Z.; Lenski, Richard E. (2008). "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (23): 7899–906.
   
   
3. The citation is already in the quote.

Rumraket (or anyone in the know), is there primary literature for your answer to number four?

Well, yes, but it's so basic I'm hard pressed to come up with an example that directly deals with proteins, since it's a totally basic principle of chemistry (reaction kinetics).

Put it this way: You put your finger in water, does it instantly dissolve despite being made mostly of proteins? Your body is like 60% water, and you still don't fall apart, despite being also mostly protein. The sea is full of life, fish live there, jellyfish, sponges, crustaceans etc. etc.

Yes, proteins hydrolyse in water, slowly. Very slowly. All that is required, is for the formation of the bonds to be faster than the rate of degradation. Chemical reactions in your body constantly make new proteins and put them, uh-oh, directly into the water inside and outside your cells, yet these proteins don't instantly fall apart right after they have been synthesized. If they did life would be impossible.
That's because the rate of spontaneous hydrolysis is actually very slow. So slow, in fact, that organisms have specially evolved enzymes to help break down proteins faster (proteases such as trypsin for example) so they can digest them.

If they really did dissolve in water so fast as the creationist question implies, there would be no need for such enzymes to exist.

Countless rate-enhancing (aka catalytic) conditions for peptide bond formation are known. Biological enzymes, metal ions or metal surfaces, mineral surfaces, concentration through thermophoresis, condensation-evaporation reactions etc. etc.