Experiments demonstrating de novo origins?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Human death – that’s all the text says, in context. Extending it beyond that is stuffing something into the text that isn’t there.

Do you enjoy repeating things that are only said by you and have no relevance to what anyone else here says (except the occasional other YECer)?
That’s the only reason I can think of that would make you keep using the same assertions over and over when they have no relevance to almost anything anyone but you says here. It’s like you don’t even actually read what others write, or if you do what you read vanishes and is replaced by things you think others should be saying according to some unrealistic model you’ve bought into.

Another of those things you repeat despite the fact that they have nothing to do with anything anyone but you writes here. I presume this one stems from the fact that you believe that the truth of the scriptures requires that they be scientifically accurate – but I’ve asked repeatedly where you get that idea, and if you can point us to the passage of scripture which says that the Bible intends to be scientifically accurate. Have you found one yet?

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The OP was in regards to experiments demonstrating de novo origins, not experiments looking for God. So far as I know, only Gideon performed such an experiment with a control, and I doubt that it is repeatable.

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I D and its companion IC make specious claims and found them on ridiculously mangled versions of how evolution works. I C states, out of the gate, that evolution can only happen in unitary leaps, from one species to the next.

I D counts the large number of gene shifts, plus new genes in speciation then declares that new genes can onlyoccur as a sequence of fortuitous accidents with the calculated unlikelihood of 20 ^ number of codons in the new gene.

No, God’s perfect design has no such shoelaces-tied-together aspect.

I C throws up its hands after nailing one foot to the floor via its self-defined failure to ‘get’ evolution.
I D throws up its hands by saying that it cannot fathom how evolution could ever work, therefore it is impossible for evolution to occur without outside help, or Intelligence on a truly godlike level.

Both men have doctorates. I read a lot and possess a double Bachelor’s in Math and English. (A trifle of skepticism doesn’t hurt.) Browsing the web you can find illustrations of proteins in perspective schematic views; you will notice frequent uses of spiraling forms, and connectors, that give the appearance of having been assembled from several boxes full of specific parts - think LEGO or Tinker toys.

Next, what mechanism can convert highly specific and random-looking DNA for a working gene, to a different gene that is equally specific-yet-random, but not the same.

I apologize ahead of time for the following lengthy explanation; please reply back to tell me which parts are unclear.

Here’s how it works - via copy errors. The first genes / proteins were simple with parts like spiraling (stiff) arms with an active amino acid sticking out, or 3D shapes that look just like wrenches and pliers. No kidding! So a copy error shortens the gene, or double-copies one section somewhere in the middle.

Each position on a gene has one of ACGT; that’s one in four. Three in a row or 4x4x4=64 means that that 64 unique codons exist. Each set of three ACGT nucleobases is a codon. And each of those is significant - one means :“THIS GENE IS NOW IN SESSION” and three others mean “THIS GENE IS COMPLETE.” The other 60 encode one of 19 amino acids, When the NOW IN SESSON (OK, start) codon shows up, it encodes the 20th of those 20 unique amino acids.

So a set sequence of amino acids will fold into a spiral as they emerge from the RIBOSOME, which reads the gene, selects the encoded amino acid, and attaches it to the growing chain of amino acids. When it sees a stop codon it releases the string of amino acids, which folds (sometimes with a little help) into its correct 3D shape.

[[ for complete accuracy I would need to describe the way the gene sequence reaches the ribosome and how it captures the appropriate amino acids along the way before it reaches the ribosome - pay no attention to the man behind the curtain ]]

Imagine the effect when this gene is the result of a copy error somewhere. Copy errors are pretty infrequent, but that’s beside the point - - they do happen. How many failed copy errors would it take to exactly splice in another arm or a different active amino acid? Thousands? That is a 1 with 3 zeroes after it, TRIVIAL-

when compared to a 1 with 130 zeroes behind it, which is the sort of number I D uses. I D imagines a novel gene of one hundred amino acids requiring “experiments” totaling 20 ^ 100, or 20 times itself 100 times, or 1.267650600228229401496703205376e+130 (via my calculator app.)

If you imagine God built in a “you can’t get there from here” feature as huge as that, you wind up thinking of God as being dumber than most humans. I mean, really.

I apologize for such a lengthy explanation; please reply back to tell me which parts are unclear. Bottom line, evolution doesn’t work one amino acid at a time.

Thanks
Joel

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That was me searching for Kline’s commentary on the chiasm in Genesis 7 in the midst of a discussion I was having with @Vinnie last year.

Btw, ChatGPT will at least attempt to outline the chiasm in a requested text.

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?? I was referring to trying to find the Polkinghorne video in a recent thread.

edit: found it! Would love to hear the local experts' take on Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology - #23 by MarkD

Where in that video he talked about it I’d have to listen again to find.

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I thought you were trying to find a quote in a video… I was trying to find the Kline passage from a pdf file

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then it must have been after the time of the apostles Peter (2 peter 2) and Luke (17) because they both speak directly to a literal global flood and desctruction of Sodom and Gomorah.

Are you going to tell me that both Luke and Peter had literary genre problems?

Are you now going to bang on that we dont understand New Testament literary technique in the above texts?

You are flogging a dead horse with this literary genre nonsense…we have two New Testament writers supporting a literal reading of Genesis here…that completely debuncts your claim. Its dead…to continue pushing it is just trying to introduce heresy by adding words and meanings to the bible which arent there.

The truth is, the only reason you believe what you do is because naturalism has convinced you evolution must be true…therefore you leap onto the first theological bandwagon that supports the evolutionary tale, even when that model is opposed to Christianity itself. This is where you have constructed this literary genre nonsense even though experts do not agree with the literary genre claim about genesis.

a classic example on these forums is the ridiculous claim that Psalm 104 supports the flat earth belief…it clearly does not. How that model can then be applied to a literary technique in Genesis (given Psalms are clearly poems) is absurd!

Im going to put you on the spot here…(yes/no answers)

Do you believe angels saved a real man Lot?

Do you believe that Sodom and Gomorah were really destroyed by fire from heaven?

Do you believe Moses existed and the Exodus really happened?

Do you believe that Jesus cast demons into a heard of pigs who ran down into the sea and drowned themselves?

Do you believe Paul was bitten by a poisonus snake and survived in fulfillment of Mark 16:18 even though science says no poisonus snake have ever existed on that island where Paul was shipwrecked?

[Mark 16:18

They will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover

I do recognise the argument that it could have just been that the local islanders were superstitious of any snake bite - like Australian Aboriginals “pointing the bone” but i have faith that the local islanders had enough lifes experience to know that the snake that bit him was poisonus and that the bible story is true.

I also recognise that i must believe the Island of Malta poisonus snake bite because if i do not, then my belief in the authenticity of the entire bible narrative begins to unravel…I make no apology for that claim.

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Out of respect for the OP, it would be courteous to actually focus on his question before derailing the conversation with yet another go-around with oft repeated tangents. Keep the topic the topic.

More specifically, the focus of this forum is concerned with God and science.

Welcome to the BioLogos Forum! This is a place for gracious dialogue about faith and science.

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We’ve been over this: that’s an opinion, but it’s adding more to the text than is there. And it’s an opinion based on the faulty premise that you can understand scripture without actually having to study, to do your homework.

No, I’m going to tell you yet again that you have failed to grasp the text because you insist that the Holy Spirit had to inspire it in a way to make it so you could understand it without having to actually do the necessary studying.

That YEC arrogance is yet another thing that turns people off from Christianity.

No, we don’t – that’s your assumption based on treating the entire Bible as something that you are capable of understanding without bothering to study!

Why is it that for YECists ignorance is a virtue?

Once again, stop the lying! I know, you have to force everyone else to ft into your little categories, but I have said before and I say again that I don’t care about naturalism, I care about the text

Stop the lying, please. I’ve said before that I came to the evolution question after I’d studied the text of Genesis, and didn’t find it relevant – I don’t buy into your idea that Genesis talks about science.

All that said, I’m not going to join your derailing of the thread any further than this.

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No, my request is not to stump anyone, it is to learn. I am a Christian seeking to decide between ID and theistic evolution based on scientific fact.

I will seek to be more precise: I am looking for seminal papers demonstrating the de novo generation IN VITRO of either biopolymers (i.e. homochiral biopolymers, polycarbohydrates, or a self-replicating catalytic RNA molecule) or of primitive life forms (i.e. a single cell) from non-living building blocks with minimal investigator interference.

I am not looking for studies aimed at the in silico reconstruction of evolutionary trees of existing functional proteins / organisms, etc.

EDITED: addendum to clarify that I am not looking for theological arguments and that I already believe in Jesus.

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Origin of life is my primary interest.

Origin of novelty within evolution is of secondary interest; addressing someone like Douglas Axe in protein evolution. I think the opsin paper above got at this, but always happy to receive more sources.

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Here I’ve been passing this one over thinking you were asking about creating the cosmos de novo, and there certainly is no way to demonstrate that. What you’re asking for isn’t quite so far fetched though I doubt anyone will offer anything that can satisfy you.

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Good points, and I hope you are helped with your request. However, I am wondering how you distinguish ID and TE. If you could expand on this a little, I would appreciate it.

Lately, I have been looking at Denis Noble’s biological relativism… still not sure at how it fits with ID and TE, but I like how it’s not obvioulsy an ID argument.

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I clicked on the thread because my first thought was “de novo origins of what?”

Only to find the intended topic is 'way outside my range of knowledge.

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I second that! :+1:

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Comments (along with some references) that I’ve made previously pertaining to the Axe study:

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There is a BL article on the topic.

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That’s what my very first college biology professor said, and my very first geology professor. To me it means that uniformitarianism is what should be expected from a Creator.

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In the Bible, miracles have the specific purpose of pointing to God. John uses the term “signs”. Jesus refused to work miracles for those not interested in gaining theological insight, and Paul complains about those seeking signs rather than listening to the gospel message. In everyday experience and historical record (including that recorded in the Bible), we see that miraculous events are quite rare. Even when they do occur in the Bible, they seem to achieve the bare minimum necessary to get back to normal - Moses has advance notice, but just the right wind parted the Sea of Reeds; the axe head floated but had to be picked up and fastened back on better; water turned to wine had to be served in the ordinary way; etc. Likewise, when we look at the aspects of creation that have left physical traces, they seem to consistently follow regular natural laws. Thus, I would strongly suspect that God created life through the process of abiotic chemicals gradually reaching adequate complexity to become a living system, rather than through miraculous intervention.

However, such chemicals would not tend to preserve very well. Most bacteria are extremely simple in form. Once you get past tiny circles, ovals, commas, and twists, and how many, if any, hairlike projections there are from the cell, you’ve covered the appearance of most kinds of bacteria. Determining if some microscopic speck in a rock is a simple cell versus some abiotic speck is not easy. Thus, the fossil record won’t help us much in tracing any processes of abiotic origins of life.

We get some hints from biochemistry. All living things use a similar genetic code and the same basic suite of 20 amino acids. But the tRNAs coding for them fall into groups which hint at a simpler ancestral system using fewer categories. The widespread use of RNA for very basic functions in the cell suggests a past with more RNA and less protein. This hints at something simpler than any existing life, but doesn’t get you back to the origin of the molecules and structures.

Conversely, working from simple chemicals, it is possible to use a variety of conditions to simulate the early earth and see what can be built. A wide range of modestly more complex molecules that are key building blocks of living things can be made, including short polymers. If we could run such an experiment for a few million years across an entire planet, would we start to see some more complex chemical systems developing? It seems plausible but quite difficult to test.

The claim that new structures cannot be formed without intelligent intervention is incorrect. A few decades ago, I encountered a study where they took one gene and tried selecting for a different function, using in vitro evolution. The result was an effective enzyme for the new task.

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To me, this is the biggest hurdle. Not only do we need to factor in the immense volumes of water and time periods involved, we also have to factor in the number of planets where these reactions are taking place.

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