didymos
Posts: 1828
Joined: Mar. 2008
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| Quote (didymos @ May 08 2008,00:56) | | Quote (Louis @ May 08 2008,00:49) | LOL George Whitesides a pseudocreationist? Bollocks and utter crap! This chemfarmer chap is talking out of his puckered posterior sphincter.
As you note, George's group have been doing OOL research for years, he's no abiogenesis denialist. In fact (and I'll see if I can dig this out) a few years back he wrote an article about what major scientific questions chemistry has to answer. Guess which topic was prominently in the list? |
Yeah. I'm poking around for a transcript, but I imagine what Whitesides actually said was something along the lines of "This shit's really hard and I'm not going to pretend I know what went down. There will be surprises in store." But, you know, more chemicalish and eloquent-like. Based on Quoteminer's accuracy, it seems pretty likely Whitesides was a bit less charitable regarding ID than claimed. |
Found this summary on the OOL part of the talk:
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George Whitesides (GW) gave a talk entitled “Questions about questions about the origins of life”. It was actually a kind of homily summarizing his summaries. Ok. Let’s see if I can do better than that. GW has been ruminating on the origins of life and has come to the conclusion that neither the physicists or the biologists are equipped to solve the problem.
The first matter that he paraded before the audience was this- is it enough to say that the world is bifurcated into two domains- alive and not alive? Is it binary or continuous? GW thinks it is continuous. It just occured to me that prions may be a good present day exception to the assertion that it is binary. But what really matters is the question of whether life was continuous or binary during the peribiotic period while life was forming.
GW suggested that it is important for us to find examples of chemical fossils. These would be chemical compositions left intact from that era. The problem of the origin of life cannot be answered by simple extrapolation backward from present biology because the peribiotic conditions in which life arose have not been present for several billion years. We are far from understanding the chemical and redox makeup of the peribiotic world.
The origin of life arose from reaction networks that afforded molecular species that could self amplify or self replicate in an anoxic, reductive environment.
The question of the mechanistic origins of life is vastly different from the question of the mechanistic evolution of life.
Both are chemical phenomena and a mechanistic picture of both will ultimately be assembled by chemists of one sort or other.
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and this account which gives some more detail:
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I saw an excellent lecture by George Whitesides of Harvard yesterday. His official status as god-of-chemistry – and the fact that his talk was tantalisingly entitled ‘Questions about questions about the origins of life’ – meant that the small hall was packed to overflowing.
Whitesides put a health warning on the talk – there were very few facts, a lot of speculation, and no answers. Nevertheless, in forty minutes he set out a research agenda that could allow chemistry to answer one of the most fundamental questions – how life began.
Unlike the ‘puzzles’ that trouble most chemists (projects such as total synthesis of a natural product, where much of the intellectual satisfaction is in the journey, rather than the destination; where its possible to frame the question absolutely; and where its clear that there is an answer to be found), this is a true ‘problem’, he argues – it’s really not clear what questions need to be answered, or if there is even an end-point to be reached.
There has been fifty years of research into how simple biological molecules could have formed from the prebiotic components available on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago. Likewise, progress towards defining the ‘RNA world’, where that molecule acted as both information carrier and catalyst before DNA arrived on the scene, is pretty good.
But there is a hug gap to bridge between the two, says Whitesides, and chemists are best place to build it. So if you want to get started on a problem which he predicts will take generations to crack, here are a few of his suggestions:
- Work out the organic chemistry of black smokers, the underground geothermal chimneys that spew out a hot, fertile mixture of organics and inorganics
- Figure out what kind of chemistry is possible in deep space
- Work out how ‘primitive co-factors’ – enzymes that contain clunky inorganic bits, such as the nickel-dependant urease – which are common to most forms of life could form.
- Discover how ion gradients (potassium inside the cell, sodium outside the cell) can form from natural processes. ‘People ask me where life comes from,’ says Whitesides, only half-joking, ‘and I say Alberta’. He’s specifically referring to an evaporated salt sea that would have concentrated these ions in its shrinking pools.
- Likewise, how did the triphosphate energy-carrying group arise?
Interestingly, he thinks that the search for the origins of chirality doesn’t fall into this catalogue of life’s fundamental aspects. Organic chemists love chirality, which is why so much effort is expended on figuring out life’s preference for left-handed amino acids, he says – but ultimately it’s a distraction. ‘It’s a real Rorschach test for people,’ he told me. ‘Either you think it’s really important, or not important at all’. Hmmm – Ron Breslow is clearly in the former category, and indeed so am I. On the other hand, it’s a brave man that bets against Whitesides.
He argues that it’ll take new ways of thinking about chemistry to tackle the origin of life problem – and trying to reconstruct these complex networks will take a lot of hard maths (so the biologists are no use, he adds). So – anyone up for the challenge? |
Neither account mentions a thing about Whitesides waxing-ecstatic about the intellect of the ID crowd. Both pretty much confirm my guess as to the true content regarding OOL. Quoteminer it is then.
Hopefully, the ACS will make a full transcript available, because I'd love to read it.
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I wouldn't be bothered reading about the selfish gene because it has never been identified. -- Denyse O'Leary, professional moron
Again "how much". I don't think that's a good way to be quantitative.-- gpuccio
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