Мой комментарий к ролику Дж.Тура

Не то, чтоб я выпячивал свои экзерсисы, просто удобно сохранить в зоне доступности и не выдумывать по сто раз, что отвечать. Кмк, упомянул вроде все главные тезисы. Сам ролик:

Мой конспект статьи А.С. Спирина по проблемам гипотезы РНК-мира находится здесь.

To cross-reference, the works of the late Prof. Spirin (Russia) attest to what Dr Tour is saying. Problems exist left, right and center and OOL, as it is approached by naturalists, is nowhere near to be solved. Spirin's response to a newspaper question on the status of OOL research:

"The question is not how life could have formed from RNA but how nucleotides themselves could have been synthesized. For two years I tried to get my head around the problem and came to the conclusion that life must have come to Earth from space. I am convinced that nucleotide synthesis is impossible under any conditions from among those that we know of. The only assumption we are left with is that they came into existence in an unknown way. If you wish, you can think of divine intervention, but we are unaccustomed to this. If you like, you can just say that cosmic conditions are so versatile that it is possible to find those that we could not even theorize about». Translation mine, source: https://www.ng.ru/nauka/2004-04-14/13_life.html

Now, my personal take on this.

1. It almost totally agrees with what Dr Tour is talking about. The only difference I noticed is that Prof. Spirin (2007) claims that non-enzymatic nucleotide polymerization in aqueous solutions leading to the right 3'-5' bonds was actually achieved, for up to 40-mers. However, this synthesis, was using nucleoside-phosphoramidate substrates, which is problematic in terms of realistic prebiotic conditions. He quoted the following works: - Ferris J.P. and Ertem, G. Monmorillonite catalysis of RNA oligomer formation in aqueous solution. A model for prebiotic formation of RNA // J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 1993. V. 115. P. 12270-12275. - Ferris J.P., Hill A.R., Liu R., and Orgel L.E. Synthesis of long prebiotic oligomers on mineral surfaces // Nature. 1996. V. 381. P. 59-61. - Ferris J.P., Joshi P.C., Wang K.-J., Miyakawa S., and Huang W. Catalysis in prebiotic chemistry: Application to the synthesis of RNA oligomers // Adv. Space Res. 2004. V. 33. P. 100-105. - Huang W. and Ferris J.P. Synthesis of 35-40 mers of RNA oligomers from unblocked monomers. A simple approach to the RNA world // Chem. Commun. 2003. V. 12. P. 1458-1459.

2. As regards panspermia, it seems that it is just moving of the goal posts. Using hypotheses like panspermia, one isn't buying much really as the amount of probabilistic resources in the universe is insufficient for the first life to be synthesized by non-telic processes. On this, refer to a really good book: An introduction to Evolutionary Informatics by Marks, Dembski, Ewert. It is available on Amazon.

3. Life is chemistry + function. For life to counter the second law, it must include complex machinery for reproduction. This machinery is, in essence, a semantically closed complex consisting of an instruction set and a processor for this instruction set (recall Prof. Behe's notion of irreducible complexity, bang right 'in the middle' of all life). The instruction set includes BOTH the instructions to rebuild the system per se, AND the instructions to rebuild the processor to rebuild the system with! For someone trying to find a non-telic process to account for that, it is a hopeless business. The theoretical foundations for this were laid by people like Polanyi, von Neumann, Watson, Crick, Brenner, Nuremberg and others. Their key scientific predictions, such as: -the irreducibility of the measuring function, to the motion of the particles of matter the measuring device consists of (von Neumann); - to facilitate the replication of a non-homogeneous system, a description of it should exist in memory (von Neumann, his own term is 'quiescent description', i.e. a description that does not take part in the dynamics of the system it describes); - the necessity for the duality of copying and interpretation of DNA (von Neumann), and - the adaptor hypothesis (Crick, Brenner);

were stunningly verified by subsequent research. As recently as in 2015 though, a Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for research into DNA/RNA instability. The scientists had found that for replication to function stably without deterioration, the processor MUST include subroutines of error correction during replication. This ties in brilliantly with the paradox of Manfred Eigen (articulated in 1971): - it is observed that the replication error rate rockets with the growth of the size of the DNA molecule; - so, to ensure a stable process without a catastrophic increase of replication errors, DNA replication must be accompanied by a corrector BUT... - at the same time, the length of the code for a simplest corrector is LONGER than the max length of a DNA molecule that can replicate without a catastrophic increase of errors.

Because information translation comes first, and only then comes evolution (whatever its realistic capabilities in constructing complex functional systems), essentially, Eigen's paradox in the light of the DNA instability research amounts to saying that there IS NO prebiotic Darwinian type selectable path to life. Even though things may look promising on paper, the 'dirty' details of reality preclude a Farina type of bingo show from happening, full stop.

4. THE ONLY thinkable way out of this n-th order conundrum is super-naturalism. But people like Prof. Benner (not to be confused with Sydney Brenner, the co-worker of Francis Crick) want to live in their comfort zone, at all costs :) even at the cost of the quality of their own research.

Reality does not build adaptors for itself! Organization is about building specific boundary and initial conditions for the flow of energy/matter in the system. The boundary/initial conditions and the laws/regularities of nature are two different and complementary concepts irreducible to one another. Those people who think that the laws of motion could be responsible for building specific symbolic (!) constraints for the flow of mass/energy in a system are making a gross category error (a 'not even wrong' kind of thing). An epistemic separation between the boundary/initial conditions and the laws of motion is the single most significant contribution to science by sir Isaac Newton (according to Eugene Wigner, a Nobel prize in physics in 1965).

Notwithstanding the misconceptions and prejudices of Farina's camp about ID, its scientific agenda is fruitful, includes testable hypotheses and is really the way forward.