by Richard William Nelson | Jun 27, 2010
Faced with the failure of the Stanley-Urey model to explain the origin of life, evolutionary scientists have been exploring the RNA World theory. With only the four nucleic acids required to form RNA (pictured left) rather than the twenty amino acids to form a protein, the chance probability tipped the advantage to the RNA-first theory, but that is not all.
In The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Richard Dawkins explains –
“This is the RNA World. To see how plausible it is, we need to look at why proteins are good at being enzymes but bad at being replicators; at why DNA is good at replicating but bad at being an enzyme; and finally why RNA might just be good enough at both roles to break out of the Catch-22.”
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by Richard William Nelson | Jun 20, 2010
Why Evolution is True, one of the best-selling books in support of evolution written by Jerry Coyne and endorsed by Richard Dawkins, conveniently fails to address one minor evolutionary issue—the origin of life problem. Charles Darwin had been stonewalled by this problem, too, in The Origin of Species.
In the mid twentieth century, using a simple laboratory experiment, Stanley Miller (pictured left) and Harold Urey (pictured right) were the first to demonstrate how life may have started from simple molecules and energy. In the excitement, addressing the scope of the Miller-Urey probability issue was postponed.
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by Richard William Nelson | Jun 6, 2010
The discovery of a primate-like fossil named Ida in 1983 launched a complex, nearly three-decade-long investigative and media blitz and bust. Ida (pictured left with Bloomberg and Hurum) was discovered in the Messel quarry (pictured right) in Hesse, Germany.
Rumors soon emerged that this pristine, primate-like fossil appeared to be a potential link in human evolution. In 1995, the pit was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. By 2009, Jens Lorenz Franzen (pictured right below with Ida and Hurum), head of Paleoanthropology at the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt, declared the fossil as –
“The eighth wonder of the world.”
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Faced with the failure of the Stanley-Urey model to explain the origin of life, evolutionary scientists have been exploring the RNA World theory. With only the four nucleic acids required to form RNA (pictured left) rather than the twenty amino acids to form a protein, the chance probability tipped the advantage to the RNA-first theory, but that is not all.
