Serialization Blog
I will be using this Serialization Blog to post articles as episodes in a series. You will be able to find the full articles on the Articles page of this website. I’ll also be throwing in some stand-alone posts as well. These Principles of Creation posts are based on my original ideas and the hope I have to renew the whole approach today to Christian Creationism and science.
#13 Protocells without Enzymes?
An article by Leslie Orgel (2008) entitled “The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth” investigates whether biochemical pathways could have occurred in simplified ways without the catalysing function of complex enzymes. Could autocatalytic cycles have occurred in protocells on the primitive Earth? Biochemical research on reactions has shown that although mineral catalysts can…
#12 Stereospecific Properties
It was the French biochemists François Jacob and Jacques Monod working in the 1960s who recognized the significance of the shape-recognition properties of protein enzymes with their substrates, and protein transcription factors with DNA. Morphogenesis is microscopic. Monod anticipated that, “…. the construction of a tissue or the differentiation of an organ – macroscopic phenomena…
#11 Origin of biochemistry
Origin of life is about the origin of biochemistry. Biochemistry is the chemistry of carbon-based molecules, the organic molecules of life. Carbon is unique in its ability to form stable bonds with other carbon atoms and to form long chains or rings. The carbon atom forms four bonds, so a carbon atom in a chain…
#10 Emergent Properties
Emergence – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When a system reaches a certain level of complexity, a new phenomenon emerges. It is the idea that if evolution keeps on adding ingredients to a biological system, it will finally transform itself into something new and qualitatively different from what existed before. …
#9 Spontaneous Order
“Since Darwin, we turn to a single, singular force, Natural Selection, which we might as well capitalize as though it were the new deity.” (Kauffman 1995, page 8). Stuart Kauffman tackled the question of the origin of life and mounted a major challenge to the accepted belief that Natural Selection is the only source of…
#8 Ribozymes?
Let us look in detail at the catalytic properties of RNA. The single intron of the large ribosomal RNA of Tetrahymena thermophila (a ciliated protozoan) has self-splicing activity in vitro. This RNA was named a ribozyme because it is an RNA that acts like an enzyme. However, most, if not all other RNA-based catalytic reactions…
#7 RNA World
Watson and Crick published on the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. By then it was known that the cell was not just a collection of molecules in cytoplasm bounded by a membrane, but a miniature world of metabolic pathways precisely regulated by an information-carrier: the DNA molecule. Over the next decades, DNA replication…
#6 Miller-Urey Experiment
Great excitement was generated by an experiment performed in 1953 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. They set up an apparatus containing methane, ammonia and hydrogen gases with water vapour to represent the hypothetical early Earth atmosphere and passed electric sparks through it to simulate lightning strikes. In this reducing atmosphere, the heavy energy input…
#5 Metabolism without Enzymes and Cell Membranes?
Clay Catalysts Metabolic processes within cells are catalysed by protein enzymes. It was realized that the formation of macromolecules had to be catalysed by something, and unless life pulled itself up by its own bootstraps these catalysts could not be enzymes. So, it was proposed by A.G. Caines-Smith in 1985 that clay composed of silicates…
#4 Primeval Soup Theory
The Primeval Soup Theory for the origin of life on Earth was first proposed by J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), a British Marxist biologist who lived in the USA and Britain, and Alexander Oparin (1894-1980) of the USSR. It is the idea that life arose from inorganic matter under conditions proposed as having existed on…
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