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From: j.nobel.daggett@gmail.com (LDagget)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: The tar paradox
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:35:56 +0000
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On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 10:22:43 +0000, MarkE wrote:

> On 14/12/2024 5:25 pm, erik simpson wrote:
>> On 12/13/24 9:51 PM, MarkE wrote:
>>> On 14/12/2024 3:31 pm, erik simpson wrote:
>>>> Without reproduction tar is what you get for sure.  Nitrogen is high
>>>> enough concentration cause death by asphyxiation.
>>>
>>> No reproduction prebiotically, therefore you're agreeing that the tar
>>> paradox is an OoL showstopper?
>>>
>> I misprinted.  It's not a showstopper if the prebiotic reproduction is
>> present. It might be very slow or fail at some point.  The important
>> thing is that it's happening in many places.
>>
>
> What do you mean by "prebiotic reproduction"? Self-replicating naked
> RNA? An autocatalytic set containing informational polymers?
>
> In either case, these are disallowed if the tar paradox is unresolved.
> And it appears to not only be unresolved, but largely unacknowledged.
>
> Your statement "The important thing is that it's happening in many
> places", is a vague, unsupported assertion, not an argument.

This is a pretty goofy thread.
The initial assertion about adding energy means you produce tar is
the vague and insufficiently correct thing. Let's break it down.

If you start with a soup of organic molecules and add in some high
energy reactants, you'll get a great deal of non-specific reactions.
I'm referring to, for example molecules prone to produce, for example,
free radicals or epoxides. These are so energetic that they will react
with the first thing they hit. That's somewhat exaggerated, but the
key point is that they won't show much discrimination so the reactions
that are "enabled" highly varied, not specific.

With even a very modest understanding of biochemistry, you should see
that this is unlike biochemical reactions. Biochemical reactions,
especially the sorts involved with biopolymers are vastly more
specific, and require much less activation energy than exists with
free radicals and epoxides. You attach molding around a door with
finishing nails and a small hammer, not a wrecking ball.

So the naked statement about "when you put energy into organic material
it turns into asphalt" is not very useful. In fact, the rest of that
quote runs rough over the facts as well.

But beyond this, it presses an absurdity: it presses the idea that
scientists think abiogenesis involved strictly random chemical
processes.
I'll grant there are astrobiologists, and even some ill-informed
biologists
that might speculate that way. But serious scientists all invoke
catalysis
early. And even basic knowledge of catalysis says that the chemistry
being done is a lower activation energies and is highly specific.

So the core question at hand is, why are you indulging in this
irrelevant aside about high energy, uncatalyzed reactions, when your
supposed focus in on OoL research?

Establishing ways to fail doesn't mean much. Visit an undergraduate
O-chem lab. All those kids with written directions failing to produce
the correct products doesn't mean the reactions don't work. It might
mean the search for intelligent life is difficult.