Leslie E. Orgel†
Citation: Orgel LE (2008) The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth. PLoS Biol 6(1): e18. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060018
Published: January 22, 2008
Copyright: © 2008 Leslie E. Orgel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Leslie E. Orgel, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California, United States of America. This paper was submitted on behalf of Leslie Orgel, after his death on 27 October 2007, by Gerald Joyce, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, United States of America. E-mail: gjoyce@scripps.edu
† Deceased.
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ALGUMAS CITAÇÕES SOBRE A QUESTÃO DA ORIGEM DA VIDA:
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 68: "The origin of life remains one of the great scientific mysteries. The central conundrum is the threshold problem. Only when organic molecules achieve a certain very high level of complexity can they be considered as 'living', in the sense that they encode a huge amount of information in a stable form and not only display the capability of storing the blueprint for replication but also the means to implement that replication. The problem is to understand how this threshold could have been crossed by ordinary physical and chemical processes without the help of some supernatural agency."
Paul Davies, Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004 [original: Houghton and Mifflin, 1988]), 115: "It should be stated at the outset that the origin of life remains a deep mystery. There are no lack of theories, of course, but the divergence of opinion among scientists on this topic is probably greater than for any other topic in biology... The essential problem in explaining how life arose is that even the simplest living things are stupendously complex. The replicative machinery of life is based on the DNA molecule, which is itself as structurally complicated and intricately arranged as an automobile assembly line. If replication requires such a high threshold of complexity in the first place how can any replicative system have arisen spontaneously?"
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ALGUMAS CITAÇÕES SOBRE A QUESTÃO DA ORIGEM DA VIDA:
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 68: "The origin of life remains one of the great scientific mysteries. The central conundrum is the threshold problem. Only when organic molecules achieve a certain very high level of complexity can they be considered as 'living', in the sense that they encode a huge amount of information in a stable form and not only display the capability of storing the blueprint for replication but also the means to implement that replication. The problem is to understand how this threshold could have been crossed by ordinary physical and chemical processes without the help of some supernatural agency."
Paul Davies, Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004 [original: Houghton and Mifflin, 1988]), 115: "It should be stated at the outset that the origin of life remains a deep mystery. There are no lack of theories, of course, but the divergence of opinion among scientists on this topic is probably greater than for any other topic in biology... The essential problem in explaining how life arose is that even the simplest living things are stupendously complex. The replicative machinery of life is based on the DNA molecule, which is itself as structurally complicated and intricately arranged as an automobile assembly line. If replication requires such a high threshold of complexity in the first place how can any replicative system have arisen spontaneously?"
Armand Delsemme, Our Cosmic Origins: From the Big Bang to the Emergence of Life and Intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 160: "The origin of life remains an immense problem and the gaps in our knowledge are countless."
Christopher P. McKay, "Astrobiology: The Search for Life Beyond the Earth" in Steven J. Dick, ed., Many Worlds (Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 49: "The origin of life remains a scientific mystery. Despite impressive advances in the abiological synthesis of important biomolecules since the early work of Miller, the processes that lead to life have not been duplicated in the laboratory. The record of the events on Earth have been destroyed and there is a scarcity of data. There is, however, an abundance of theories."
Stanley L. Miller and H. James Cleaves, "Prebiotic Chemistry on the Primitive Earth" in Isidore Rigoutsos and Gregroy Stephanopoulos, eds., Systems Biology Volume 1: Genomics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3: "The origin of life remains one of the humankind's last great unanswered questions, as well as one of the most experimentally challenging research areas... Despite recent progress in the field, a single definitive description of the events leading up to the origin of life on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago remains elusive."
Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 197: "It has to be admitted that the origin of life remains a deep mystery."
Grazyna Stochel, Malgorzata Brindell, Wojcieck Macyk, Zofia Stasicka, and Konrad Szacilowski, Bioinorganic Photochemistry(West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 109: "Most of the (bio)chemical processes found within all the living organisms are well understood at the molecular level, whereas the origin of life remains one of the most vexing issues in chemistry, biology, and philosophy."
Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24-25: "Dawkins is not a chemist or a physicist. Neither am I, but general expositions of research on the origin of life indicate that no one has a theory that would support anything remotely near such a high probability as one in a billion billion. Naturally, there is speculation about possible nonbiological chemical precursors of DNA or RNA. But at this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."
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COMENTÁRIO DESTE BLOGGER:
Antes de morrer, com este artigo, Leslie E. Orgel, o maior especialista sobre a origem da vida, deixou bem claro: o Mysterium tremendum continua Mysterium tremendum. Traduzindo em graúdos: nós sabemos muito sobre as implausibilidades de cada cenário sobre a evolução química. Traduzindo em miúdos: os cientistas não sabem realmente nada sobre a origem da vida.
E os nossos livros-texto de Biologia do ensino médio aprovados pelo MEC/SEMTEC/PNLEM continuam engabelando nossos alunos com as 'just-so stories' [estórias da carochinha da evolução química]. Não informar objetivamente o status epistêmico sobre a origem da vida no contexto de justificação teórica é 171 epistêmico.
Algum Promotor Público lê este blog? Se há, por favor, faça alguma coisa, pois já entregamos no MEC duas análises críticas sobre a abordagem da evolução química e biológica em 2003 e 2005 e nada foi feito.
Ciência e mentira não podem andar de mãos dadas!
E os nossos livros-texto de Biologia do ensino médio aprovados pelo MEC/SEMTEC/PNLEM continuam engabelando nossos alunos com as 'just-so stories' [estórias da carochinha da evolução química]. Não informar objetivamente o status epistêmico sobre a origem da vida no contexto de justificação teórica é 171 epistêmico.
Algum Promotor Público lê este blog? Se há, por favor, faça alguma coisa, pois já entregamos no MEC duas análises críticas sobre a abordagem da evolução química e biológica em 2003 e 2005 e nada foi feito.
Ciência e mentira não podem andar de mãos dadas!
