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I'd like to see a creationist response to this. They tend to either reduce to "No, because the book says otherwise" or be legitimately inventive. Wonder what a

I'd like to see a creationist response to this. They tend to either reduce to "No, because the book says otherwise" or be legitimately inventive. Wonder what a creationist lab would look like...

valine 11y ago
As a creationist who has a very rudimentary understanding of chemistry and biology, I can tell you that my first reaction to this model is to look at its apparent reliance on a fairly complex template and assume (correctly or incorrectly) that this template is too complicated to be derived by chance in a single, finite universe. I then decide that I would rather believe in an infinite God rather than an infinite number of theoretical universes, and at which point I stop reading hacker news and go back to work. Please note that this comment is intended to provide a creationist's initial reaction to an article for anyone curious, not to debate the origin of the universe.
- Cogito 11y ago
  What leads you to think that the templates are necessarily very complex? In my reading, the models requires the presence of polymers, let's call them A, B, and T; and a cyclical mechanism that causes these polymers to alternately bind to each other and release each other (through chain to chain ionic or hydrogen bonds). The polymers themselves are formed of chains of smaller monomers covalently bonded to each other. A, B, and T are floating around, and occasionally bind to each other. The nature of our template T is such that both A and B can bind to it at the same time. Importantly, T doesn't need to be much larger, or more complex, than A or B, just able to bind to one of the ends of each. So we have our polymers floating around looking something like (this is my purely made up notation): *A*: AAaAaA *B*: BbbBbBB *T*: TTaAabBBT They move into the night cycle, causing them to bind to each other with ionic or hydrogen bonds: AAaAaA BbbBbBB ||| ||| TTaAa-bBBT Due to the ends of the A and B chains now being so close to each other, they form a covalent bond, resulting in a new polymer chain C: *C*: AAaAaABbbBbBB |||||| TTaAabBBT The day cycle comes around and the template breaks away from the newly created chain. Thus the template is acting like a catalyst, able to create many identical copies of this polymer C. C is a more complex polymer than either A or B and could easily become a template itself. It's not much of a stretch to then consider a polymer which either was a template for itself, or was part of a sequence of templates that produced each other. To your complexity point, it doesn't seem obvious that these templates are necessarily "fairly complex" - indeed if you admit the existence of polymer chains in the first place the ability for one of them to act as a template seems trivial.
- drewolbrich 11y ago
  When you state that the template is too complicated to be derived by chance in a single, finite Universe, I think you are not fully grasping the massive parallelism of this process across the Earth's surface, multiplied by the vast time scale involved, multiplied by the number of planets in the observable Universe.

I'd like to see a creationist response to this. They tend to either reduce to "No, because the book says otherwise" or be legitimately inventive. Wonder what a creationist lab would look like...

valine 11y ago

As a creationist who has a very rudimentary understanding of chemistry and biology, I can tell you that my first reaction to this model is to look at its apparent reliance on a fairly complex template and assume (correctly or incorrectly) that this template is too complicated to be derived by chance in a single, finite universe. I then decide that I would rather believe in an infinite God rather than an infinite number of theoretical universes, and at which point I stop reading hacker news and go back to work. Please note that this comment is intended to provide a creationist's initial reaction to an article for anyone curious, not to debate the origin of the universe.

Cogito 11y ago
What leads you to think that the templates are necessarily very complex? In my reading, the models requires the presence of polymers, let's call them A, B, and T; and a cyclical mechanism that causes these polymers to alternately bind to each other and release each other (through chain to chain ionic or hydrogen bonds). The polymers themselves are formed of chains of smaller monomers covalently bonded to each other. A, B, and T are floating around, and occasionally bind to each other. The nature of our template T is such that both A and B can bind to it at the same time. Importantly, T doesn't need to be much larger, or more complex, than A or B, just able to bind to one of the ends of each. So we have our polymers floating around looking something like (this is my purely made up notation): *A*: AAaAaA *B*: BbbBbBB *T*: TTaAabBBT They move into the night cycle, causing them to bind to each other with ionic or hydrogen bonds: AAaAaA BbbBbBB ||| ||| TTaAa-bBBT Due to the ends of the A and B chains now being so close to each other, they form a covalent bond, resulting in a new polymer chain C: *C*: AAaAaABbbBbBB |||||| TTaAabBBT The day cycle comes around and the template breaks away from the newly created chain. Thus the template is acting like a catalyst, able to create many identical copies of this polymer C. C is a more complex polymer than either A or B and could easily become a template itself. It's not much of a stretch to then consider a polymer which either was a template for itself, or was part of a sequence of templates that produced each other. To your complexity point, it doesn't seem obvious that these templates are necessarily "fairly complex" - indeed if you admit the existence of polymer chains in the first place the ability for one of them to act as a template seems trivial.
drewolbrich 11y ago
When you state that the template is too complicated to be derived by chance in a single, finite Universe, I think you are not fully grasping the massive parallelism of this process across the Earth's surface, multiplied by the vast time scale involved, multiplied by the number of planets in the observable Universe.