Mr. Benedict misrepresents Manfred Eigen

Manfred Eigen, won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work measuring extremely fast chemical reactions brought about by energy pulses. Though proud to use the term evolution, his models of the origin of life are not based on chance but on self-organizing chemical reactions that cycle to higher and higher levels. He is also the author of Eigens Paradox that explains a critical problem in positing cycles of RNA that lead to DNA.

Mr. Benedict has this problem; he doesn’t have any idea of what “random” or “chance” or “random chance” mean in probability theory, chemistry, or how they might apply in evolutionary theory, or studies of the origin of life. When I have taught statistics and probability at the college level, I had the advantage of very intelligent students committed to learning. I doubt that this is currently the situation.


One of the greatest philosophical advances of all time was the notion that real life should be the basis for our understanding of the universe. This was in direct contradiction of Platonic ideas of some “perfect” reality which was beyond the perception of humanity. But, this appeal to reality is what makes science ‘work.’ In this specific context of the “Eigen’s Paradox,” we can default to real physical data which trumps philosophical speculation. The particular result I have in mind is;

Ádám Kun, Mauro Santos & Eörs Szathmáry
2005 “Real ribozymes suggest a relaxed error threshold” Nature Genetics 37, 1008 - 1011 Published online: 28 August 2005 | doi:10.1038/ng1621

Abstract: The error threshold for replication, the critical copying fidelity below which the fittest genotype deterministically disappears, limits the length of the genome that can be maintained by selection. Primordial replication must have been error-prone, and so early replicators are thought to have been necessarily short. The error threshold also depends on the fitness landscape. In an RNA world, many neutral and compensatory mutations can raise the threshold, below which the functional phenotype, rather than a particular sequence, is still present. Here we show, on the basis of comparative analysis of two extensively mutagenized ribozymes, that with a copying fidelity of 0.999 per digit per replication the phenotypic error threshold rises well above 7,000 nucleotides, which permits the selective maintenance of a functionally rich riboorganism with a genome of more than 100 different genes, the size of a tRNA. This requires an order of magnitude of improvement in the accuracy of in vitro–generated polymerase ribozymes. Incidentally, this genome size coincides with that estimated for a minimal cell achieved by top-down analysis, omitting the genes dealing with translation.

Mr. Benedict misrepresents Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Prigogine, won his 1977 Nobel Prize for his theory that biological life self-assembled from inorganic non-life through the non-equilibrium thermodynamic processes. Again, random chance was abandoned, this time for the notion of an outside force arising in a thermodynamic process that, somehow, energized evolution. Such a force has never been identified.

Like every creationist I have ever encountered, Mr. Benedict is clueless about thermodynamics. There is no “outside force” invoked by Prigogine.
Two resources for Benedict to read are;

“The second law of thermodynamics and evolution”
http://2ndlaw.oxy.edu/evolution.html

C. Bustamante, J. Liphardt, F. Ritort
“The Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Small Systems”
Physics Today, vol. 58 (2005) 43-48
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0511629

The "Laws" of thermodynamics only operate within boundary conditions, no different from Newton's "Laws" of motion. They are just dandy within their boundary conditions, but utterly fail beyond them. In particular, it is known that the 2nd law does not hold at extremely small scales, such as found within cells. The 1st law fails in quantum vacuums. This is real science, not superstition, or mysticism.

Mr. Benedict misrepresents Christian de Duve

Mr. Benedict makes much of a list of scientists who, according to him, "recognize that random chance alone cannot have produced the simplest cellular life." I'll quote Benedict's remarks, and interpose corrections in

Blue

Christian de Duve, for example, a Nobel Prize winner, and in no way an advocate of Intelligent Design, has abandoned random chance as the agent of upwards evolution or the ascent of man. He envisions primordial planet earth as a chemical reaction

(secondary citation to de Duve, “Contingency and determinism” Pier Luigi Luisi, doi: 10.1098/rsta.2003.1189 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 2003 361, 1141-1147 )

waiting to happen. Recognizing that the odds of random chance being impossibly against

(Links to a 1995 OOL review article, "The Beginnings of Life on Earth" in American Scientist for general readers. De Duve did not make a single reference to any probability, or “odds” or “random chance” opposing the natural origin of life. Just the opposite, in fact. The main thrust of the article was de Duve’s well known argument for the centrality of thioester chemistry to the OOL, and that life will be- must be- ubiquitous in the universe. This is not a surprising error for a creationist like Mr. Benedict to have made, either from ignorance, or dishonesty)

the formation of a single cell, let alone man, he has ceaselessly been searching for the string of chemical reactions that, once started, must have inevitably and, without chance, led to mankind. So far... no luck.

De Duve, like Gould and others rejects the strict teleological argument that somehow humanity is the "goal" of evolution, or the Universe. Mr. Benedict seems to have no actual grasp of any of these issues which should have been clear if he had tried to read the references he scattered in his comment).

"Darwinism is Dead" Oh really?

Monday, 4 July, 2011
There was a little essay, posted on the intertubes last Saturday by Paul Benedict that is a real creationist gem. It has all the low points, false premises, quote mines, citation bluffing, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics that creationists have spouted for over a generation. For example, as the title implies the main claim is that, “… for decades microbiologists have been abandoning Darwinism.” This is well known as, “The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism.”

In its own way, this essay was a sterling example of Googling for answers, but actually reading the cited papers reveals that Mr. Benedict is either incompetent to read them, or has purposely lied to his readers (no surprises there!). That’s not all, Folks! Mr. Benedict also likes his creationism with an ID spin; we are treated to vacuous “complexity” claims, the Discotute list of names, and Benedict closed with, “It's time to tell the kids: it is statistically impossible that Darwin's explanation of the origin of life is correct.”

Let’s look at that last sentence first.

First of all, there was never an explanation of the origin of life offered by Charles Darwin. In the “Origin of Species” Darwin directly observed that there was no logical connection between the origin of life, and how life had evolved. Evolutionary theory is based primarily on the observations of living species, their diversity, and distribution. In the “Origin,” Darwin makes only the general observation that,

"I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences."

Later Darwin wrote a letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker (1871) noting that,

"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."

Later in the same letter, he observed,

"It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."

Since the entire thrust of Mr. Benedict’s little essay is that “Darwinism is Dead” because “random chance” isn’t an explanation of the origin of life, we know that Benedict understands nothing about evolutionary theory, probability theory, or current research on the origin of life.

I'll take up these issues below.