ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012), edited for
brevity — The quest to recreate the chemistry that
might have allowed life to emerge on a prehistoric Earth began in
earnest in the 1950s. Since that time researchers have focused on a
chemical path known as the formose reaction as a potential route
from the simple, small molecules that might have been present on
Earth before life began to the complex sugars essential to life, at
least life as we know it now....
But as chemists continued to study the formose reaction they
realized that the chemistry involved is quite messy, producing lots
of sugars with no apparent biological use and only the tiniest bit
of ribose. As such experimental results mounted, the plausibility
of the formose reaction as the prebiotic sugar builder came into
question. But the problem was that no one had established a
reasonable alternative...
"We were thrown a lot of curve balls we had to really think
through," said Krisnamurthy of the years he spent working with
postdoctoral fellow Vasu Sagi, who is lead author of the new paper.
The team's
experiments revealed that under the right conditions, DHF and
glyoxylate, when in the presence of a few other plausible prebiotic
chemicals including formaldehyde, would produce sugars known as
ketoses. Ketoses in turn can be converted to critical sugars,
including some essential to forming certain amino acids, the DNA
and RNA building blocks such as ribose.
Though the new research soundly proves the plausibility of one
of the facets of the glyoxylate scenario, the chemistry involved is
only one of three key series of reactions researchers will have to
identify in order to complete a viable path from a primordial soup
to life's building blocks.
While glyoxylate is a plausible prebiotic component, there's not
yet a known prebiotic pathway to DHF, so the Krishnamurthy team is
already working to identify possibilities.
A third critical conversion would have to occur after production
of ketoses. Right
now, the only known paths for the conversion of ketoses to ribose
and other critical sugars are transformations by living organisms.
Whether and how such conversion might have proceeded before life
arose remains an open research question.
My comments on the above article are:
1. Evolutionists are still toying with the idea of a primordial
soup, that somehow, given the right conditions and right mixture,
and lots of time as well, nonliving matter with turn into organic
living things which ultimately leads to the variety of living
things we know today.
2. Evolutionists have to ASSUME the existence of the primordial
soup for their cherished ideas to work. But where does the
primordial soup and the "ingredients" come from? And how did the
"ingredients" possess the properties they have?
3. That we need scientists (intelligent people) to experiment on
how to create life from nonliving chemicals repeatedly using
designed and controlled tests again show that, if successful
at all, it does not prove evolution at all, but intelligent
design!
4. The take home point is this, naturalism as a worldview is
doomed to fail. The better alternative is Creation, that there is a
loving and purposeful God who created the universe and all that is
in it, including life.
