"HEADLINE SCREAMS:
SciTech Daily: The Fountain of Life: Scientists Uncover the “Chemistry Behind the Origin of Life”
Chemists uncover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock paths to speed up chemical synthesis for drug discovery.
Purdue University chemists have discovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water — something that has baffled scientists for decades.
“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said Graham Cooks. He is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery.”
The process is familiar by now: Show something slightly new in.webp)
chemistry, wildly extrapolate its significance to the media, and make an extravagant claim suggesting that we now see how life can arise naturally.
The article said: “Chemists discover a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water, which leads to proteins and so to life on Earth.” Peptides are short chains of amino acids; proteins are composed of much longer chains of amino acids.
Purdue University chemists have discovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water — something that has baffled scientists for decades.
“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said Graham Cooks. He is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery.”
The process is familiar by now: Show something slightly new in
.webp)
The article said: “Chemists discover a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water, which leads to proteins and so to life on Earth.” Peptides are short chains of amino acids; proteins are composed of much longer chains of amino acids.
--But for life, the specific sequence of amino acids in a protein is essential for it to fold properly into a functional three-dimensional configuration.
--The requirement of a particular sequence of amino acids endows the protein with vast amounts of information, far beyond what could be “chanced upon” by any natural process within the history of the entire universe.
The superficial gloss of the article
is promoting scientific nonsense."
UncommonDescent
