Inertia Posted:

And I’m willing to admit that I understand not one sentence in that article

Admittedly, this is well beyond my area of expertise, but I’ll weigh in with my thoughts.

Basically the article is the polar opposite of the creationists “1 x 10^1000000000000etc” arguement. I stopped reading after they claimed that because the ocean had a definite volume and an estimated concentration of 10^-6M of amino acids, that there was a definite (x mol/liter)*y liters= z moles of starting material available.

In reality, at such a low concentration, you need to worry much more about the frequency of collisions of molecules, and whether these collisions possess enough energy to initiate a reaction. The big picture that many biologists seem to miss out on is that the entire universe is governed by energy. Quite literally, without energy, nothing can happen. This might be my chemistry bias showing through, but just because something seems like it could happen doesn’t mean it actually can and will happen. The combination of amino acids into peptides is not exactly a thermodynamically taxing reaction pathway, but you still need the parts present in a large enough concentration with enough energy for anything productive to happen. Even then, with the conditions we speculate existed on the early Earth, there would be plenty of competing destructive reaction pathways to greatly reduce the realistic “odds” of abiogenesis.

Here’s a fantastic quote from this gibberish article

Fundy evolutionist are just as bad as creationists Posted:

Yes, one kilogram of the amino acid arginine has 2.85 x 1024 molecules in it (that’s well over a billion billion); a tonne of arginine has 2.85 x 1027 molecules. If you took a semi-trailer load of each amino acid and dumped it into a medium size lake, you would have enough molecules to generate our particular replicator in a few tens of years, given that you can make 55 amino acid long proteins in 1 to 2 weeks

2.85 x 10^24 is certainly a large number, but for those of us who aren’t ****tarded, we recognize that that is about 5 moles or so of arginine. Not exactly an overwhelming thought, and certainly not enough of this essential building block to say “oh billions of billions of molecules surely some of them must have reacted in a way to form life”

Again, this is completely out of my area, and I know I’m not as informed as many other people on this topic, but rudimentary chemical kinetics seems to call much of the “claims” of that article into question.