( Worth reading article, in plain simple language – why First Living Cell theory still has unanswered questions., and was Intelligence Design still at play in First Living Cell?).

Some excerpts;

“There is an important distinction between the genetic code and the information in DNA or RNA: The genetic code is essentially the language in which the genetic information in the DNA or RNA is written. In order to evolve into the DNA/protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines — which themselves are encoded by genetic information. This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them. 

To appreciate the obstacle this poses to materialistic accounts of the origin of life, consider the following analogy. If you have ever watched a DVD, you know that it is rich in information. However, without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: Intelligent agents designed both the player and the disk at the same time, and purposefully arranged the information on the disk in a language that could be read by the player. 

The Proper Machinery

In the same way, genetic information could never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules — they perform and direct the very task that builds them. This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. A functional living cell therefore can’t evolve in a piecemeal fashion, but the likelihood of it arising all at once by unguided natural processes is far too low to be considered a viable model. 

Biologist Frank Salisbury explained this problem in American Biology Teacher in 1971, not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered:

“It’s nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes…[T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules…How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It’s as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don’t see them at the moment.³“

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posted by f.sheikh

( A very well written one of the best books, A true story of slavery and escape to feedom which played outsize part in sequence of events that led to civil war and abolition of slavery)

A few days before Christmas in 1848, an enslaved woman named Ellen Craft donned a stovepipe hat in Macon, Ga. The hat completed a daring costume that Craft used to disguise herself as a white man and book travel all the way to Pennsylvania on a series of trains, steamboats and carriages. Ellen told fellow travelers that she was a planter going north to seek medical care. Her enslaved husband, William, came with her, pretending to be her property.

The ruse worked. Together, Ellen and William Craft pulled off one of the most dramatic escapes in American history by performing, in broad daylight, as master and slave. But their story did not end there. By the time the American Civil War began, the Crafts had international reputations. And as Ilyon Woo makes clear in her excellent new book, “Master Slave Husband Wife,” the couple also played no small part in the sequence of events that led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

It started with a plan that some sources, including Woo, credit to Ellen, who was born enslaved to her own father, James Smith, a white planter who also enslaved Ellen’s 18-year-old mother, Maria. The laws of slavery offered Maria no protection from rape by her owner, and in 1837, no doubt because of Ellen’s light complexion and physical resemblance to Smith, his wife gave Ellen to their daughter Eliza, as a wedding present upon her marriage to Robert Collins of Macon.

In Macon, while legally owned by her half sister, Ellen met and fell in love with William Craft, an enslaved cabinetmaker in town. They shared traumatic memories of separation from family members. In Ellen’s case, her transfer from Smith’s plantation to Collins’s house wrenched her away from her mother. William had been permanently torn from a beloved sister, who was sold at a public auction when the siblings were children. Determined not to be separated from each other or to have children who might be sold away from them, the Crafts decided to act on their plan for escape as 1848 came to a close.

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posted by f.sheikh

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Over time, courts accepted that all people who are incarcerated lose the protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. The legacy of that legal deference is a grim one. Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all.

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posted by f.sheikh

During a chaotic period some 50 million years ago, the strange deep-sea creatures left the ocean bottom and thrived by clamping onto their mates.

(A male anglerfish. Over time, the male can physically fuse with the female, connecting to her skin and bloodstream. Eventually, the male loses its eyes and all internal organs except for the testes.Credit…David Shale/Nature Picture Library, Alamy)

How did the ghoulish creatures known as anglerfish pull off the evolutionary feat that let them essentially take over the ocean’s sunless depths?

It took peculiar sex — extremely peculiar sex.

Finding a mate in the deep sea can be extremely difficult because of the environment’s incomprehensibly vast size. By some estimates, the dark zone amounts to more than 97 percent of the planetary space inhabited by living things, mainly because the ocean plunges to a maximum depth of nearly seven miles. In contrast, land habitats make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere because the band of life is so narrow, making its volume quite small.

Scientists at Yale University have discovered that a burst of anglerfish diversification began some 50 million years ago as the ancestral line developed a bizarre strategy to ensure successful reproduction in the dark wilderness.

To mate, tiny males would clamp with sharp teeth onto the bellies of much larger females. Some males would let go after mating while others would permanently fuse into the females. The males that stayed attached became permanent organs for sperm production.

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posted by f.sheikh