tgamble

Thomas's response should be up sometime today.

Remine, in his last response, quotes Francis Crick

Crick, F., 1981, Life Itself, p47
"Such an astonishing degree of [biochemical] uniformity was hardly suspected as little as forty years ago"[4]

Anyone have this reference? I somehow doubt that the quote is in context. Thanks

pangloss

Even if it is in context, so what?

ReMine - and cretins in general - seem to think that if something was "unexpected", it is somehow damning evidence against evolution.

Such a position is utter nonsense.

As are most of ReMine's positions.

Albion

It's in a chapter called "The Uniformity of Biochemistry," and it's talking about the genetic code.

"Even if there existed an entirely separate form of life elsewhere, also based on nucleic acids and protein, I can see no good reason why the genetic code should be exactly the same there as it is here. [digression about the similarities to and differences from the Morse Code.] If this appearance of arbitrariness in the genetic code is sustained, we can only conclude, once again, that all life on earth arose from one very primitive population which first used it to control the flow of chemical information from the nucleic acid language to the protein language.

Thus, all living things use the same four-letter language to carry genetic information. All use the same twenty-letter language to construct their proteins, the machine tools of the living cell. All use the same chemical dictionary to translate from one language to the other. Such an astonishing degree of uniformity was hardly suspected as little as forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate. I find it a curious symptom of our times that those who derive deep satisfaction from brooding on their unity with nature are orften quite ignorant of the very unity they are attempting to contemplate. Perhaps in California there already exists a church in which the genetic code is read out every Sunday morning, though I doubt whether anyone would find such a bare recital very inspiring.

We see, then that one way to approach the origin of life is to try to imagine how this remarkable uniformity first arose. Almost all modern theories and experimental work on life's origin take as their starting point the synthesis of either nucleic acid or protein or both. How could the primitive earth (if indeed life first started on earth) have produced the first relevant macromolecules? We have seen that these chain molecules are made by joining together small subunits end to end. How could these small molecules have been synthesized under early, prebiotic conditions? And how could we decide, even if we could have watched the whole operation in atomic detail, when the system first deserved to be called "living"? To come to grips with this problem we must examine next just what attributes we would expect any living system to have."<end of chapter>

lpetrich

It's here!!!