The Law of Biogenesis

[Don Fanucci]

All observations have shown that life comes only from life.

Nope. Read up on Craig Venter. Very cool seminar by the way. Four bottles of chemicals, a computer, and voila.

I did I read the published paper. I am not a geneticist but I got the gist of what he did He did not create life. He created a gene that controlled an already existing bacteria. He did this by using yeast to grow his new DNA sequence. Without using existing life he could not have even done this.

You cannot take the bottles and mix them nothing will happen .

All this proves is that you need life to create life.

So yes all life arises from life. Unless you are stating that the scientist was not alive.

Ummmm. No. He didn't create a gene, he synthesized an entire genome from the four bases that are the building blocks--got them out of a bottle; one bottle, one base. The yeast were used to knit the individual fragments together. It can be done synthetically, but its cheaper to use yeast. most molecualr biologists have done these steps at some point in their life, and many do them every day. Essentially, the yeast step of the process is combining the oligonucleotides (strings of the 4 bases) into subsequently longer fragments, until you eventually have one big fragment. And no, he didn't use it to control an existing bacteria. He took the cell membrane, after removing the bacterial DNA, and inserted his synthetic genome into it, then booted the whole thing up into a living, replicating organism. This all can be done on a lab bench, but using living organisms as tools is cheaper. At some point the whole thing will be done from simple chemicals, but at this point, the key purpose of the paper is to prove that you can make a genome de novo, and have it function.

Scientific American doesn't agree that anything new was created. Amusingly, Craig Venter is labelled a "drama queen" - "the Lady Gaga of Science" - full of hype and self-promotion. Lol!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=craig-venter-has-neither-creatednor-2010-05-27

Craig Venter has neither created--nor demystified--life

By John Horgan

Craig Venter is the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion. Hype is what Craig Venter does, and he does it extremely well, whether touting the decoding of his own genome several years ago or his construction of a hybrid bacterium this year. In a typical Venter touch sections of the bacterium's DNA translate into portentous quotes, such as this one from James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to re-create life out of life."

So I don't fault Venter for hyping his recent achievement, but I do fault others who should know better, such as the bioethicist Arthur Caplan . "What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved," Caplan proclaims on this Web site . Venter and his colleagues have "created a novel life-form from man-made parts." Caplan warns that "this hugely powerful technology does need oversight" (no doubt by bioethicists like Caplan).

Actually, Venter has taken just another incremental step in the human manipulation of life, which began millennia ago when our ancestors started breeding dogs and ducks and accelerated recently as a result of advances in biotechnology. In terms of scariness, the synthesis of a poliovirus in 2002 freaked me out much more than Venter's work.

Venter’s team synthesized and modified DNA from one type of bacteria and inserted the artificial genome into another bacterial species whose own DNA had been extracted. "The form of life that was created was not new," Mark Bedau, a philosopher at Reed College and editor of the journal Artificial Life , said in Science . "What was essentially done was the re-creation of an existing bacterial form of life, except that it was given a prosthetic genome (synthesized in the laboratory), and except that the genome was put into the cytoplasm of a slightly different species."

As Bedau and others point out, scientists still have not come close to creating a living organism from nonbiological materials, especially ones that might have existed on Earth four billion years ago. In other words, scientists have not shown how life began, how inanimate materials become animate.

This problem of life's origin appears harder today than in 1953, after a 23-year-old graduate student named Stanley Miller filled a glass chamber with methane, ammonia, hydrogen (representing the atmosphere) and water (the oceans). A spark-discharge device zapped the gases with simulated lightning while a heating coil kept the waters bubbling. Within a few days the water and gases were stained with a reddish goo rich in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. (Jeffrey Bada, a biochemist and former student of Miller, recently reanalyzed Miller's old samples and discovered that they contain even more amino acids than Miller had realized.)

Miller and other scientists thought that they would quickly demonstrate in detail how genesis unfolded, but that hasn't happened. When I interviewed Miller in the early 1990s, he admitted that the problem of life's origin had turned out to be much harder than he had imagined. He was nonetheless still confident that one day scientists would crack the riddle of life's origin: "It will be in the nature of something that will make you say, 'Jesus, there it is. How could you have overlooked this for so long?' And everybody will be totally convinced." Miller died three years ago , his dream unfulfilled.

There are now almost as many theories of life's origin as there are theorists. Perhaps the most popular is the "RNA world" theory, which posits ribonucleic acid as the first biomolecule. Whereas DNA cannot replicate without the help of enzymes, RNA can act as it own enzyme, snipping itself in two and splicing itself back together again. But RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions. Moreover, once RNA is synthesized it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of coaxing by a chemist. Stanley Miller, among others, believed that some simpler—and possibly quite dissimilar—molecule must have paved the way for RNA, but no strong candidate has emerged.

Arthur Caplan declares that Venter and other scientists have dispelled the notion that life "is sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding." Wrong. We still have no idea how life began, or whether life exists only here on our lonely planet or pervades the cosmos. One of the great ironies of modern science is that as we gain more power over life, it remains as fundamentally mysterious as ever.

And that was sort of the point of the original study. Scientific American is more of a lay journal that reviews original research. The purpose of venter's work was to recreate a living organism from the genome sequence of that organism. Why? Because to make something up from scratch would not have worked. The technology needed to be developed first--create an entire genome out of chemicals and proving that it could be done by showing that the outcome was a dividing organism. Done. That's why his study was published in a top journal, not Scientific American.

[Isaiah 6:8]

Again you have an intelligent life creating something by intellect. self arising lif has not happened as you claim. Btw "Scientific American" is a staunchly pro evolution mag and for them not jumping on this to back them says voulmes.

[Don Fanucci]

Again you have an intelligent life creating something by intellect. self arising lif has not happened as you claim. Btw "Scientific American" is a staunchly pro evolution mag and for them not jumping on this to back them says voulmes.

Doesn't metter. It simply demonstrates that there is at least one alternative to creationsim as to how life arose. There are two explanations as to the mechanism by which life began-the creation account and everything else (I use "mechanism" because as you know, I believe God is responsible for it, but the way he did it is through evolution, however I digress). Venter is taking the first step towards the "everything else" explanation. BTW the author of the SA article is a journalist writing about science, not a scientist writing about science. He clearly missed the significance of the study. Venter is in the private sector and what his long term goal is, is to develop designer bugs that can be built to do specific tasks that involve some aspect of microbiology--metabolism, catabolism, fermentation, protein production, etc. These genomes can be synsthesized faster and faster, so pretty soon, you'll have off the shelf metabolic engines that can do what you need done--from grease cleanup to production of an array of pharmaceutical products.

[MorningGlory]

The only one who can accomplish biogenesis is God Himself.....what's so hard to understand about this?

The concept is simple, but not everyone agrees the statement is true. If I make a claim that only aliens could have seeded life on Earth, it isn't a hard concept to understand but it is quite a pill to swallow as correct.

It's not hard at all for those who believe.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

... At some point the whole thing will be done from simple chemicals...

At some point... so it hasn't been done up to this point, but here's the assurance that it will. I remember when I first read about this finding and I was grossly disappointed by how it was represented as the creation of life. It was the same tag line in 1953 with the Miller-Urey experiment, which was supposed to have unraveled the mysteries of the origin of life but really only produced a couple of the fifty or so (is it) organic building blocks of life. Science seems to rely heavily on assurances of what will occur next time, as was brought up previously in this thread.

But again, doesn't the objection stand that it was with careful deliberation and brilliant design engeneering people reconstructed the genome of one of the most basic forms of life and spliced it into live tissue and it worked, so is this what we would call a violation of the law of biogenesis?

The Law of biogenesis is that life comes from life and that life never comes from non-life... the scientists are living creatures and they worked brilliantly to accomplish the task. This to me seems no more like a violation of biogenesis than launching a ball into space and saying that since gravity dictates that what goes up must come down that we've found a way around gravity.

So with the intelligence, design and committment of the scientific community we're still striving to recreate under ideal conditions something that's supposed to have happened by unguided natural forces in a-biotic conditions.

But don't worry, at some point it will become a simple process simply done with simple chemicals... just put your faith in that assurance.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

The only one who can accomplish biogenesis is God Himself.....what's so hard to understand about this?

The concept is simple, but not everyone agrees the statement is true. If I make a claim that only aliens could have seeded life on Earth, it isn't a hard concept to understand but it is quite a pill to swallow as correct.

I'm actually finding it crazy how many people seem to be subscribing to the panspermia theory lately. Hawkings seemed to be pretty interested in the whole aliens coming here deal, and I've read a number of other comments that seem to be flirting with the idea, which would have been rejected outright just a few years ago.

The strangest thing is, or course, it would not only raise the question of where the aliens came from, but also what evidence is there that such was the case. Dismissing God as speculative despite the arguments that theism puts forth, and electing instead something which lacks the powerful explanitory power theism offers sure seems like a fool's gambit to me, but while we may disagree it looks to me like it may not be too long before people find it easier to swallow that pill than you suggest.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Again you have an intelligent life creating something by intellect. self arising lif has not happened as you claim. Btw "Scientific American" is a staunchly pro evolution mag and for them not jumping on this to back them says voulmes.

Doesn't metter. It simply demonstrates that there is at least one alternative to creationsim as to how life arose. There are two explanations as to the mechanism by which life began-the creation account and everything else (I use "mechanism" because as you know, I believe God is responsible for it, but the way he did it is through evolution, however I digress). Venter is taking the first step towards the "everything else" explanation. BTW the author of the SA article is a journalist writing about science, not a scientist writing about science. He clearly missed the significance of the study. Venter is in the private sector and what his long term goal is, is to develop designer bugs that can be built to do specific tasks that involve some aspect of microbiology--metabolism, catabolism, fermentation, protein production, etc. These genomes can be synsthesized faster and faster, so pretty soon, you'll have off the shelf metabolic engines that can do what you need done--from grease cleanup to production of an array of pharmaceutical products.

More ad hominem attacks against the speaker instead of the point.

How does this offer any alternative? How does systematically studying, copying, deliberating and engeneering changes in a genome recommend the capacity of unguided natural forces to do the same without any of the capabilities being here employed by intelligent agents?

So, apart from the personal attacks on the authour methinkshe submitted, what is Don presenting as a germaine objection to the authour's points? Isn't this just proving that some very intelligent being must have been responsible and therefore offer a powerful argument to disconfirm any alternative to creationism?

[Isaiah 6:8]

Again you have an intelligent life creating something by intellect. self arising lif has not happened as you claim. Btw "Scientific American" is a staunchly pro evolution mag and for them not jumping on this to back them says voulmes.

Doesn't metter. It simply demonstrates that there is at least one alternative to creationsim as to how life arose. There are two explanations as to the mechanism by which life began-the creation account and everything else (I use "mechanism" because as you know, I believe God is responsible for it, but the way he did it is through evolution, however I digress). Venter is taking the first step towards the "everything else" explanation. BTW the author of the SA article is a journalist writing about science, not a scientist writing about science. He clearly missed the significance of the study. Venter is in the private sector and what his long term goal is, is to develop designer bugs that can be built to do specific tasks that involve some aspect of microbiology--metabolism, catabolism, fermentation, protein production, etc. These genomes can be synsthesized faster and faster, so pretty soon, you'll have off the shelf metabolic engines that can do what you need done--from grease cleanup to production of an array of pharmaceutical products.

I disagree. It does matter, This is not a matter of an alternative. You see you need to manufacture life, the bottles of chemicals mixed, do not produce life, with out some outside force arranging them, using a supercomputer to plan it. This proves nothing, There is no life arising from nothing. This has not been proved.

All this proves is it takes intellegent life to produce life.

[DC10]

The theory of evolution is usually thought of as being applicable only to things that are already alive.

Popularizers like Dawkins disagree. Are you familiar with his Weasel program? It attempts to demonstrate the origin of life using natural selection on abiotic matter.

I would agree that it's senseless to pretend that such could be the case, but it's not some kind of Creationist misunderstanding to address the application of evolution on non-living material.

However, I think it is true to say that many ideas in the scientific literature about the origin of life itself rely on selection processes akin to natural selection.

Natural selection only works through reproduction. NS selects from what's available among living organisms, cutting out organisms that are less adapted for certain environments. Without life there is no pressure from selection, i.e. nothing from which to select. The process fundamentally requires living organisms that can reproduce, otherwise it would have to be a physical force, physically moving abiotic matter around, and selecting not for survival advantage but deliberating for future potential advantage... and an immaterial force acting physically to assemble something with deliberation would simply be a description of God or some kind of ghost or whatever.

Actually, my comments in the earlier post probably owe their origin to having read some of Dawkins's books.

I think the Weasel program first sees the light of day in the chapter entitled "accumulating small change" in Dawkins's "Blind Watchmaker". The purpose of the chapter is not to discuss the origin of life, but to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection, because "Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe [i.e. natural selection], but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially nonrandom". The weasel program is indeed used in the context of a discussion on life's origin, but that discussion is solely within the framework of natural selection.

If you read the chapter, I hope you would accept that my post sits comfortably within Dawkins's view.

[DC10]

The only one who can accomplish biogenesis is God Himself.....what's so hard to understand about this?

So the primeval puddle of chemical mix and the lightning bolt theory is wrong?

It's still around, even if it's evolved quite a lot - I suppose it would have to, really, wouldn't it? I get the feeling that it has now gained widespread acceptance as just one way of providing some of the raw materials.