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In part one of this series, we examined some of the claims that creationists make regarding cosmology and planetary science. With the development of the universe and the formation of the Earth covered, let’s now dig into the emergence of life on Earth, an event referred to as abiogenesis, meaning life arising from non-living matter. Creationists are obsessed with this event not just because it contradicts the special creation narrative that defines their
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relationship with their deity, but also because it is so unintuitive, and so hard to understand on a technical level. This makes it easy to confuse others by misrepresenting facts and appealing to emotion. Life comes from life. Everybody knows that. So how could life come from non-life? Let’s go over some concepts in physics and chemistry that will help elucidate this concept. The first thing we must do is try to understand some things about what abiogenesis may have
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produced. When creationists scoff at the idea that life could come about by natural processes, they are always misrepresenting the product of abiogenesis. Some look at the complexity of modern animals, which of course is totally insane, as can be said for any multicellular life form. Obviously the first living organism was unicellular. Therefore, some creationists will look at something like a yeast cell. This remains profoundly dishonest,
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as yeasts are eukaryotic, and therefore the products of endosymbiosis events that produced far more complex unicellular organisms than existed for the billion years prior. Some will go further and examine extant bacterial cells, since those are prokaryotic, but this is still totally inaccurate. While modern prokaryotic organisms are much simpler than even unicellular eukaryotes, they are still the products of billions of years of evolution,
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and are dramatically more complex than the first organisms must have been. Bacteria have structures like flagella, cell walls, simple organelles, and DNA-based genomes. The discrepancy in complexity from the first life to extant bacteria is about as significant as from extant bacteria to a human being, or perhaps even greater. The first living organism would have been what we can refer to as a protocell. It would have been the simplest structure that meets the requirements
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we attribute to life, meaning that it performs metabolism and self-replicates. This means that there are enzymes which are capable of promoting chemistry, and it must have had some genetic material, or information storage system, which most scientists in the field believe was RNA, not DNA. RNA and DNA are both nucleic acids, but RNA is structurally different in various ways, the most important of which is that it tends to be single-stranded as opposed to double-stranded.
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Because of this openness, RNA is capable of performing various catalytic functions, which opens up the possibility of RNA acting as both genetic material and enzyme. RNA strands would have been the first self-replicating entities, through a process called autocatalysis, which we will get to a bit later. The point is that the first protocell definitely needed RNA, it may have needed another class of biomolecule called polypeptides,
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and it must have had some kind of membrane to preserve its contents from its surroundings. There are two facets to explaining how this system can have arisen. The first is a more purely chemical domain, where we must figure out how the various biomolecules can have formed. That would mean amino acids, which are the monomers that polymerize to form polypeptides, and then ribonucleotides, which polymerize to form RNA. We need routes to the monomers,
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and then mechanisms by which they polymerize, or link together to form chains. Once these polymers formed there would have been an incredibly complex mixture, thus necessitating some kind of selection mechanism in order to produce a narrowed-down mixture of replicating biopolymers, which complexified over time to eventually produce the simplest living system. This is what is studied by the field of systems chemistry. Before we begin to elucidate these two aspects,
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let’s knock out a few creationist straw men preemptively. First, creationists will pretend that in order to substantiate abiogenesis as a concept, scientists need to create life in a lab. This is preposterous for many reasons. First, if abiogenesis occurred, then it occurred whether or not life ever produced sentience to probe its origins, or even multicellularity in general. The validity of the process was the same in the stone age as
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it is today. Second, we don’t need to physically recreate something in order to substantiate its existence. We have an enormous amount of knowledge regarding the birth, life, and death of stars, and we don’t need to build a star in a laboratory in order to substantiate what we know about stars. Third, and most importantly, creationists presume that abiogenesis, as promoted by science, involved some molecules floating together and becoming a cell in an instant. This is not the
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case. We can’t just stick some molecules together like a lego set and produce a living cell, because nature also did not do that, so the request has nothing to do with natural processes. In reality, sets of molecules exhibiting autocatalytic behavior evolved by natural selection over long time spans to gradually produce a system that could be called a living organism. In fact, the instant that such a system could be labelled life would be extremely difficult and somewhat
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arbitrary to define. There is a gradient called the physico-chemical continuum linking chemical systems and living organisms, and the boundary between the two is blurry. Life and non-life are not a binary system like heads and tails. Beyond this, creationists are fully aware that if anyone in the related but separate field of synthetic biology did truly synthesize an entire living cell
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from scratch, they would simply remark that only an intelligent designer could achieve such a feat, therefore god created life. It’s a lose-lose gambit designed in bad faith. But again, we will return to this concept of autocatalysis and systems chemistry in a moment. Offshoots of this line of thinking include the tornado in a junkyard argument. Creationists will say that life arising by chance is like thinking that a tornado could run through a
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junk heap and assemble a 747. As dumb as this sounds, this argument is used everywhere from science illiterate preachers all the way up to credentialed intelligent design proponents. First, the choice of comparing life to a manmade object is as deliberate as it is preposterous. Man made objects are known to have human designers. Of course they do not assemble any way other than how we chose to assemble them according to our design. That has absolutely nothing to do with
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nature. Second, this notion of simply sticking pieces together to make an object, once again, has very little to do with what science proposes. A process that was clearly both iterative and gradual can’t be compared to a singular event. In general, every analogy that refers to man-made objects is inherently deceptive. The implication is that humans make complex things, therefore everthing complex must have been made by someone. This falls apart immediately by looking
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at nature. Snowflakes are geometrically highly complex, such that their beauty can rival man-made art and architecture. However, they form by purely natural processes in the atmosphere. Therefore, an equally appropriate analogy would be to say that complex objects like snowflakes form naturally, therefore everything complex forms naturally. This would also be wrong, as many complex objects are
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designed. In the end, complexity and design just do not correlate at all. This becomes abundantly clear if we accept that complexity is not the hallmark of design. Simplicity is. An iPad does not have thousands of buttons, some of which do more than one thing, some of which do the same thing as others, and some of which don’t do anything at all. It has one button. It is designed to be simple and intuitive to use. The biological world is not like that at all. Nature
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does not plan anything. It tries everything and keeps what works. There is no goal, there is no blueprint, no function is predetermined, it is stumbled upon. Without sentience, nature relies exclusively on mutation and selection. We will later expand on this idea quite a bit, but let’s introduce a relevant key concept now. Here is a demonstration of how mutation and selection works in the laboratory. Say you need an enzyme to promote a particular transformation. You
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need 100% yield and 100% specificity, performed highly efficiently. Scientists in this position will screen some number of known enzymes, anywhere from 100 to 100,000. The odds of getting a perfect match are infinitesimally low. But finding one that will perform the transformation very poorly are quite high. Perhaps the screening yields one enzyme that promotes the transformation with 5% yield and 5% specificity. You take that enzyme and subject it to random mutations. Out of the
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hundreds of mutants, one offers 10% yield and 20% specificity. Isolate and repeat the process. After 15 rounds of this, you have your perfect enzyme. There was no design involved, simply random mutation and selection. This process is sped up dramatically in the lab, but can easily happen over larger time frames in nature, as certain selective pressures are in place simply by virtue of certain systems of molecules being better at self-replication than others. This is the key
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aspect of abiogenesis that creationists are unable to grasp, even those with knowledge of traditional organic chemistry. Nature works with complex mixtures, it does not need pristine conditions like those used by laboratory chemists. It makes many things, and then selection takes over, allowing certain sequences to dominate over time. We can say the same thing about living systems. They are not perfect machines. Organisms have redundant functions. With no ability
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to redesign from scratch, problems are fixed with band-aids. Some parts serve no function. Faulty genes are retained. Signaling pathways are so complicated so as to barely be conceivable from an engineering standpoint. A living organism is a mess, which makes perfect sense in the context of blind forces improving upon existing templates, slowly making them better but never perfect. Going back to current origin of life research, let us go over some basic information. As we said,
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we first need to get the components of life. At the very least this means RNA, which is made of ribonucleotides, and polypeptides, which are made of amino acids. Let’s start with the simplest of these small building blocks, amino acids. These are trivial to synthesize. They are so trivial to synthesize, in fact, that they form in the vacuum of space. Chemistry is rather limited in space, since it works much better in a confined volume, typically a liquid solution,
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like an aqueous solution. Neverthless, atoms and molecules do collide in the vast expanse of space and form larger molecules, including amino acids, which is proven by amino acids found on meteorites that land on Earth. Probes that land on asteroids in space have found other important biomolecules, such as uracil, one of the building blocks of RNA. Additionally, there are plenty of pathways to get
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these molecules on a prebiotic Earth. The famous Miller-Urey experiment from the 1950s took simple molecules like methane and ammonia, introduced a spark, and got amino acids. The takeaway from all of this is that it is no problem to get amino acids. It can be taken for granted that amino acids were abundant on a prebiotic Earth. To speak a bit further about the Miller-Urey experiment, this is referenced excessively by both creationists and science advocates. The
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danger for science advocates is to pretend that the experiment substantiated abiogenesis, when it really did not. It produced the most simple and tiny building blocks of life, which was a great achievement, but is not even remotely comparable to producing life. Science advocates must be careful to not present this experiment as more than a small, early step in this field. In turn, because it is discussed so much, creationists make it a point to try and discredit it. They will say
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that only a few amino acids were produced. This is false, later spectroscopic analysis of the glassware used in the experiment detected over 20 amino acids, including most of the biological ones, as such techniques were limited at the time the experiment was carried out. Also the experiment has been recreated countless times to great success. Next, they will complain about the conditions of the experiment, describing oxidative vs. reductive conditions,
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essentially referring to the presence or absence of oxygen, which would not have been abundant in a prebiotic atmosphere with no photosynthesizing life yet around to produce it. This is meritless criticism, as the prebiotic earth was host to a wide variety of geological niches that had a variety of oxidizing or reducing potentialities, there is no need to be limiting. Nevertheless the experiment is typically done under reductive conditions to simulate the anoxic environment, and
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utilizing different combinations of gases always yields interesting mixtures of organic products, including nucleobases, another essential building block. Other important biomolecules like lipids and sugars also have well-understood synthetic pathways, the latter of which form by something called the formose reaction. The smallest components of life are easy to form, and clearly would have been in abundance on a prebiotic Earth. There is still a bit of work to get from these
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smallest molecules to the monomers that must then polymerize, at least for ribonucleotides, which have three components. There is a sugar, a nucleobase, and a phosphate. A large number of synthetic chemists focus on this specific aspect of abiogenesis, and over the past few decades enormous numbers of viable prebiotic synthetic pathways have been substantiated for each of these components and their assembly into ribonucleotides. The
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specifics of these pathways go beyond the scope of this video, but for the inquisitive viewer, a mountain of primary scientific literature is available outlining them in great detail, some of which will be linked below. Once the monomers are readily available, they must polymerize to form RNA and polypeptides. There are a number of mechanisms available here that have been firmly substantiated. The first would be wet-dry cycling. In shallow areas like
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tidal pools and hot springs, there are natural cycles like day and night, as well as tides, which result in sequential polymerization and degradation. As a pool dries out, a chain lengthens. Once wet again there is some dissociation and new monomers can migrate to the growing chain within solution. Over many cycles, long chains can form, and this has indeed been observed in nature. Additionally, very interesting chemistry can occur on catalytic mineral surfaces.
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It is known that nucleotides can polymerize on hot montmorillonite clay, according to principles of inorganic chemistry that are also beyond the scope of this video. But this has been observed for decades, and offers another pathway for polymerization. Once biopolymers are available, collections of these polymers can get trapped in small vesicles, which results in tiny compartments within which interesting interactions can occur. Thus emerges the domain of systems chemistry.
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Let’s mention some creationist talking points regarding the aforementioned prebiotic chemistry. First, they will claim that any laboratory synthesis is not applicable to abiogenesis. They will pretend to take issue with aspects of experimental design and reagents used, claiming the reagents were unavailable on a prebiotic Earth, the equipment was unavailable, the manipulations of the flask would not have occurred, and so forth. Essentially, anything
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done in any lab does not count. This is highly dishonest. In the laboratory we can test what molecules do. If they do something in a flask, it is dictated by the properties of those molecules. They will do the same chemistry anywhere. When we measure the boiling point of some compound, it isn’t unique to a laboratory setting. It’s the temperature at which that compound boils at that particular pressure, anywhere in the universe. The lab isn’t magic, and neither is nature. We
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can’t force molecules to do things in a lab that they don’t do in nature under the same conditions. Furthermore, experiments tend to test one thing at a time. There is an aspect of prebiotic chemistry being investigated, so tangential processes using reagents that are not prebiotic are not relevant to the research question. Creationists fixate on irrelevant details to distract from the point of an experiment. They will do the same thing with experimental
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setup. If any type of machinery is used, they will cry foul. This is also short-sighted, as there are certain geochemical or geophysical processes and cycles in nature that have to be simulated in the lab. The setup is specifically mimicking natural conditions. They will also do this with certain aspects of experimental protocol, like running reactions under argon gas, or washing mineral surfaces with peroxides and deionized water. Running reactions under argon
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gas is done to prevent the reaction vessel from interacting with the atmosphere, namely all the oxygen that was not there on the prebiotic Earth. Washing with peroxides and deionized water is done to kill and remove biological contaminants, such as bacteria, that obviously also were not present on a prebiotic Earth. This type of protocol makes experiments more prebiotically relevant, not less.
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Origin of life researchers are not stupid, nor are they deceptive. They do things a specific way for specific reasons, all of which are totally lost on creationists who do not understand the first thing about running chemical reactions. And of course there are aspects of laboratory chemistry that are done exclusively for the purpose of the researcher ascertaining what has happened. When chemists isolate and purify their products, it is so that they can characterize them
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using spectroscopic techniques that allow them to figure out exactly what it is that they got, and whether it is what they expected. We can’t tell what’s in a flask just by looking at it with our eyeballs. We need specialized instruments, and we need compounds to be pure for analysis. Nature doesn’t have to do that, as nature is not sentient and doesn’t care what is happening. It makes things and just keeps going. The other thing creationists will do is invent
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the concept of “time of the gaps”, the notion that scientists suggest that given enough time, all the relevant chemistry will occur. This is an obvious attempt to shift attention away from their clear god of the gaps argumentation, but additionally, it is just more deception on their part. The claim is that molecules degrade very rapidly, so if processes require long time scales, they become impossible because reactants will not remain intact. These arguments always
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cartoonishly exaggerate or misrepresent these rates of degradation, either through ignorance or through sleight of hand, extrapolating the half life of a single peptide bond under certain conditions to an entire peptide under any conditions. They also ignore the stabilizing effect that mineral supports offer, diminishing degradation while promoting polymerization. And of course the most egregious oversight is that it is a good thing that polymers degrade, because it
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establishes an equilibrium between monomers and polymers, within which different rate constants emerge for different polymers, thus enacting a kind of natural selection, whereby some polymers form more quickly, or degrade more slowly, or are more effectively stabilized, and these are factors which result in particular sequences predominating in a statistically significant way. Going back now to our vesicles full of biomolecules, we can begin to discuss
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their interactions. Certain RNA molecules have catalytic properties, that is to say, they can do chemistry. We call these ribozymes. Some have the ability to promote peptide formation, and polypeptides in turn can also have catalytic properties, promoting RNA formation, metabolism, and other functions. With both RNA and peptides capable of enzymatic activity, an incredible array of possibilities emerges. It is important to note that long polymers are not required for catalytic
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function to exist. It is not only 200-mers, or polymers with 200 monomeric subunits, that can do chemistry. Even di- and tripeptides can have catalytic influence. And for RNA, catalytic function sufficient for self-replication emerges once strands of 40 to 50 monomers arise. A picture materializes of suites of molecules interacting in increasingly complex ways, allowing all the functions of life to slowly emerge, such as primitive metabolic pathways
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for energy production, which can in turn fuel other processes like replication. Replication is done in autocatalytic fashion, where RNA molecules become capable of self-replication, or even sets of RNA molecules that form autocatalytic sets. Once this behavior arises, evolutionary principles truly take hold, as the systems of molecules that self-replicate the most rapidly and efficiently will proliferate in a statistically significant way and come to dominate
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the landscape. This is almost indistinguishable from the Darwinian concept of natural selection, as sporadic errors in replication result in novel sequences which can be either harmful or beneficial, and the best sequences are selected, just as can be said about living organisms. It should be stressed that this concept is not strictly hypothetical. These principles have been demonstrsted in the laboratory, with various ribozymes competing for a common pool of
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substrates in Darwinian fashion, compounds which are needed for amplification of the RNA sequences, and the ones which did this the most efficiently dominated the reaction mixture. It is true that complete protocells have not been produced in this manner, and sustained replication remains a challenge. But efforts in this direction are encouraging. This is an incredibly complex field which we won’t describe in further detail, but I will link to several reviews of the field in the
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description for those who wish to read further. With all of this in mind, creationists have a lot of objections, some of which are no more than voicing current limitations of the field that researchers are perfectly aware of, while others are simply demonstrations of ignorance. First, there is skepticism about the probability of these functional sequences of RNA forming by chance, the ones that are capable of catalysis, specifically autocatalysis. It’s a perfectly fine issue to
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raise, as we should want to know what proportion of potential RNA sequences possess such function, and the same goes for polypeptides. As it turns out, studies have been done to answer precisely this question, and the answer is around 1 in 100 billion. This may sound rare, and it is, but in the molecular world it’s not as rare as one might think. Molecules are staggeringly numerous. A glass of water contains around a trillion trillion water molecules. That’s 10 to the
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24th power. Compare that to 100 billion, or 10 to the 11th power, and the difference in magnitude is stark. Biopolymers are not water molecules of course, but it remains the case that in a microenvironment where it is mechanistically feasible for these molecules to be constantly forming, the number of sequences that will form is absolutely astronomical. And when you have an astronomical number of opportunities for something to occur, even infinitesimal probabilities become
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a near certainty. Whether a functionally relevant sequence comes about once per minute or once per day or once per year, nature had a long time to stumble upon these sequences, and once efficient self-replication is occurring, that information could be locked into existence if it can survive long enough to exert that function. This concept will return in part four when we discuss molecular
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biology, because similar arguments are put forward regarding DNA, proteins, and every other aspect of much more familiar biological systems, so we will continue this discussion of probability later. The next topic that creationists beat to death which pertains to the emergence of life is the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. Entropy, roughly speaking, is a measure of the dispersal of
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matter and energy in a system. So if molecules are highly concentrated and organized it would be a low entropy system, and if molecules are very spread out and disorganized it is a high entropy system. Regarding the second law of thermodynamics, some creationists claim that this law forbids order from forming spontaneously, which it doesn’t, and they regurgitate this falsehood at every opportunity. Obviously ordered structures form spontaneously all the time. Water
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molecules freeze to form beautifully patterned ice crystals. Highly ordered minerals form. Soap molecules spontaneously aggregate to form micelles, a process that also explains the formation of the first vesicle membranes from analogous molecules like simple fatty acids. Localized ordered structures are not just possible but specifically promoted by thermodynamics. What this law actually says is that the entropy of the universe must increase for any spontaneous
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process. Spontaneity is determined by the change in a parameter called Gibbs free energy, represented by delta G. This in turn is determined by the change in enthalpy, delta H, which essentially can be thought of as heat exchange when at constant pressure, as well as change in entropy, delta S, and also temperature, T, according to the following equation. The first problem lies in pretending that this law pertains to systems like a living organism or even
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the Earth itself. These are both nonequilibrium open systems, constantly in motion and exchanging both energy and matter with their surroundings. When localized ordered structures arise, like water molecules forming ice, the new interactions between the water molecules, called hydrogen bonds, cause the system of molecules to release energy. So the system of molecules goes to a lower energy, and this energy is released to the surroundings. This amounts to
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a dispersal of energy and therefore an increase in entropy for the universe. Zooming in, entropy has decreased locally, as the water molecules become more ordered, so delta S is negative, but they have released energy, so delta H is negative, and this will yield a negative value for delta G, making the process spontaneous with respect to the system of molecules. Zooming back out, once again, the release of energy means an increase in entropy for the system plus the surroundings,
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also known as the universe. The local decrease in entropy is irrelevant, it is the increase in entropy for the universe that is ordained by the second law of thermodynamics. This applies to the polymerization and aggregation of molecules as well, they are perfectly spontaneous processes. So creationists who say that thermodynamics does not permit the self-organization of ordered systems have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, or they are lying, or both.
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To go even further, plenty of studies have been done for decades regarding the manner in which systems which are receiving a constant efflux of energy, like the Earth receiving constant sunlight, will inevitably produce ordered structures so as to dissipate these external gradients of free energy, so as to move away from a position of equilibrium and release energy, thereby producing an increase in entropy for the universe. It is entirely accurate to say that for
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such nonequilibrium systems, in precise opposition of creationist claims, entropy is the thing that specifically drives the formation of locally ordered structures, from hurricanes to galaxies to living organisms. It can’t be made more clear than this. It is specifically the second law of thermodynamics which leads to an increase in order and ultimately makes life inevitable if enough time and resources are available. Another erroneous point that creationists
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make has to do with the concept of information. It is accurate to say that an RNA strand which is self-replicating contains and transmits information. Actually, any RNA strand contains information, whether it is functional or not. The information is the sequence of nucleotides in the strand, which will be some combination of A, U, G, and C. Just like how words contain information by virtue of their letters, the same can be said for these biopolymers with varying subunits. What
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matters most is functional information, which represents the probability of a configuration achieving a particular function. Creationists will therefore relentlessly ask: Where did the information come from? Some will even refer to it as “specified information”, implying that it had to be specified by a creator, since it yields such precise functionality. Other creationists pretend that information is some kind of essence or material substance that the molecule possesses,
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other than the sequence itself, and which must have its origin explained. When ribonucleotides polymerize, some sequence will result. That’s the information. Any sequence of nucleotides possesses information, so the process of nucleotide polymerization necessarily produces information. It is the process of selection, based on replication rate and fidelity, which makes this information meaningful. So anyone who asks “where did the information
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comes from” does not understand what information is nor what biopolymers are. Lastly, a newer trend is for creationists to fixate on the concept of chirality as it pertains to biomolecules. Carbon-based molecules of a certain size often exhibit chirality, or handedness, in that they have mirror images that are different from themselves, because of the way carbon can make four bonds with a three-dimensional tetrahedral geometry. Here is
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a simple molecule and its mirror image, which we would call its enantiomer. They are structurally identical, but the atoms are distributed differently in three-dimensional space. The issue for biology is that molecules exhibit bioactivity on the basis of their shape, and it is the case that both amino acids and ribonucleotides that are found in life exhibit a particular chirality out of two possibilities. That is to say, biological polypeptides and nucleic acids are homochiral. An
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important question becomes: How did this chirality arise and become implemented in biological systems? The creationist approach is to simply proclaim design, but in reality there are myriad explanations for how this occurred. When small monomers form, they can crystallize as mixtures of both forms, and then these crystals can sublime, which means going from the solid phase to the gas phase. The rates of sublimation can differ according to the composition of the crystal,
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with a specific enantiomer collecting somewhere else in greater concentration, and this is one manner in which enantioenrichment can occur. Additionally, amino acid crystallization can induce the preferential cocrystallization of a specific enantiomer of other amino acids. Looking instead at the polymerization phase, if reactions are occuring on chiral mineral surfaces, the rate of reaction for one enantiomer might be faster than the other, introducing a kinetic bias
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and thus enantioenriched polymers. This can happen with wet-dry cycling as well, if the rates of polymerization differ according to which enantiomer is reacting. We can even look to a later phase with replication, where rates can be unequal and introduce a bias yet again. This has been verified experimentally. Homochiral peptides and RNA replicate faster than heterochiral systems. A similar objection is made about oligonucleotides linking at carbon two
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on the sugar moiety as well as carbon three. Studies have shown that C3 prime linked RNA is a much better replicator than C2 prime. Additionally, other studies show that some C2 prime linkage can be present in a ribozyme and its function will be retained. With all of these objections, the key concept that creationists are missing is selection. In summary, creationists offer the poorest takes on the topic of abiogenesis out of virtually
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everything they attempt to discuss, simply because it’s the most conceptually dense and esoteric aspect of the science that offends them. The level of distortion that occurs in equating the complexity of extant life with what must have been the first protocell, or the mechanisms by which its constituent parts can have formed, is unrivaled by even the most unhinged assessments of evolution, because of how complicated these concepts are. While that was certainly a heavily
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abbreviated version of what we know regarding the origin of life, it hopefully serves to clarify the profound short-sightedness with which creationists approach this complicated subject, and there are numerous resources in the description if you wish to investigate some more. In the future I hope to create an extended series about this research, the history of the field, and much more detailed
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explanations regarding all of the facets we have discussed here, directly examining the primary literature produced by thousands of researchers, so be on the lookout for that. For now, let’s move forward to part three, where we will discuss the meatiest entry, evolutionary biology.
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