August 13, 2024 | David F. Coppedge

OOL Research ‘May Have’ Fooled Some People

The phrase “may have” is not scientific.
It is a value-laden preference stemming
from a prior worldview commitment.

 

When an origin-of-lifer says something “may have” happened, watch out! The scientist has left science and is doing philosophy—or worse, storytelling. Science deals with demonstration, not speculation.

Watch for the phrase “may have” or “could have” in these new origin-of-life (OOL) reports.

The biggest-ever sample of core material from Earth’s mantle could have valuable clues into the origins of life  (12 Aug 2024, The Conversation). Andrew McCaig from the University of Leeds was part of a team of 28 international researchers drilling into the earth’s crust in the North Atlantic Ocean. They pulled up a core six times longer than the previous one. That part is beaucoup science, a feat of engineering. Playing divination on the rocks in the core to visualize life evolving, however, leaves Main Street and enters Fantasyland.

The core we drilled as part of the IODP project is the best model we have for the rock “substrate” of the Lost City. The new core is therefore a tremendous natural laboratory for studying reactions going on within such hydrothermal fields, generating the unusual fluids that may have been important to the origins of life.

Cartoons by Brett Miller. Used by permission.

The presence of living organisms at the nearby Lost City Hydrothermal Field, however, says nothing about how they got there. They did not witness rocks or molecules becoming alive.

Lost City vent fluids are highly alkaline, and rich in hydrogen, methane and more complex carbon-rich compounds. Lost City has been suggested as a possible environment where life on Earth may have evolved.

When seeing this phrase “may have” in a scientific article, one should respond: ‘it may have, or it may not have. Where is your evidence, Dr Scientist?’ A knowledgeable Darwin skeptic could add, ‘I have evidence that it could not have evolved, even under ideal conditions.’

A long section of serpentinized depleted mantle peridotite (8 Aug 2024, Lissenberg et al., Science). This is the scientific paper. It only whispers “may have” and “proposed” when mentioning life a few times. The scientific part of this paper only concerns observations of the types of rocks in the core. Count the speculative words in this paragraph:

Furthermore, exposure of mantle rocks to seawater produces dynamic hydrothermal systems in which the primary minerals in mantle peridotite are altered to secondary minerals, including serpentine and magnetite, thereby releasing molecular hydrogen. This H2 can further fuel the generation of organic molecules in the absence of life, including organic acids, short-chain hydrocarbons, and methane. Hence, peridotite-hosted hydrothermal systems have been proposed as models of settings where prebiotic chemistry may have led to the development of life on early Earth and other planetary bodies.(6)

They not only failed to find life emerging from rocks in their observations, but they failed to observe any other planetary bodies! They tossed the hot potato of wondering how rocks could evolve into life to the noted origin-of-life Michael Russell in reference 6, a proponent of hydrothermal vents for life’s origin. Many other origin-of-lifers criticize that possibility. Russell dismisses life as a waste dump of “failed mineralogy on the seafloor” (3 Dec 2004).

A proposal should also be considered speculative. The authors point to the Lost City hydrothermal system as  “an exemplar of an ultramafic-hosted, alkaline seafloor vent, a modern analog of the environment in which some theories propose life first emerged on early Earth.” A proposal only suggests a way to enter a scientific investigation. It is not science until the proposal (or hypothesis) is tested with experiments that are reproducible.

Chirality showing the right- and left-handed isomers of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Human hands are perhaps the most universally recognized example of chirality. From Wikimedia Commons.

The Left Hand Knows Not What the Right Hand Is Doing

Has the mystery of life’s ‘handedness’ finally been cracked? (12 Aug 2024, New Scientist). We have often stressed the importance of homochirality in life. It is a tremendous hurdle for materialist origin-of-lifers to overcome. In this article, reporter Michael Le Page relies on the “may have” phrase to titillate readers into thinking that this overpowering mystery might have been solved.

A long-standing mystery about what determined the “handedness” of molecules inside living cells may finally have a solution, thanks to a happy accident in the lab.

The upshot of the claim is that Thomas Richards at the University of Oxford observed that some molecules made to pass through lipid membranes show a preference for one hand.

The researchers found that archaeal membranes and a hybrid membrane that consists of a mix of bacterial and archaeal phospholipids are much more permeable to the right-handed form of deoxyribose and ribose than pure bacterial membranes are. The hybrid membranes are also more permeable to the left-handed forms of some amino acids.

So far, that’s scientific observation. But then, the Fantasyland speculations begin. Synonyms for “may have” include “could have” or “might” or “possibly” and the short conjunction “If.”

That means these membranes are acting as a kind of sieve that separates out specific chiral forms of molecules, says Richards. If such membranes existed early in the evolution of life, they might explain why living organisms came to use these particular forms.

Yes, Fantasyland is much more exciting than Main Street.

“We were excited about this match-up between the permeability characteristics and what core central metabolism evolved to use,” he says. “It’s a really neat explanation of why central metabolism evolved to be the way it is.”

Mickey Mouse joins the Fantasyland parade as Goofy listens, not quite comprehending the connection between membranes and life:

“This paper reveals a possible prebiotic route to left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars,” says Kenso Soai at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan.

For observant readers, there are numerous problems with the proposal that membranes led to homochirality:

1. The membranes are themselves homochiral. How did that evolve? “One issue is that phospholipids in cell membranes are also chiral,” Le Page notes.

2. Nick Lane, another origin-of-lifer, is unsure that this model explains the origin of homochirality.

Lane favours the idea that early life made chemicals such as amino acids and sugars, rather than acquiring them from external sources. If that was the case, the membrane-filtering effect might just be a coincidence, he says.

3. Richards’ “sieve” mechanism cannot achieve the pure 100% homochirality required for life. Even one wrong handed molecule can spoil the function of a polypeptide chain or nucleic acid.

4. The proposed mechanism says nothing about the functional and structural significance of homochirality. Proteins with mixed hands don’t fold. And homochiral sugars are essential for the helical structure of DNA.

This new proposal is early and has not been reproduced. Most likely it will collapse on further examination, just like all the previous explanations have. Le Page recognized early in his article that homochirality in biological systems has been a profound mystery for decades.

The question is, why? Over the decades, scientists have proposed numerous explanations, many involving exotic physics, but no single idea is widely accepted.

Observation: all life uses homochiral molecules. Fantasy: somehow, it “may have” evolved. We call it fantasy because the probability of blind, unguided processes of materialist chemistry achieving this marvel is so fantastically low, it defies any rational consideration that it came to be without intelligent design (see online book, esp. chapters 3-4).

Nick Lane and his associate Joana Xavier have become vocal about the many problems in origin of life research, even though they cling to it. At least they acknowledge the problems in writing. In an interview on YouTube, Xavier has acknowledged that Meyer’s Signature in the Cell asks good questions. Perhaps they are tiring of the “may have” and “could have” habit and want to see observational demonstration. We wish them well as they get bored with Fantasyland and “may have” desired to return to Main Street.

 

 

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