* Water is the Enemy of any Naturalistic Origin of Life: One of our RSR challenges was posed today over in Germany as a question to a NASA astrobiologist by the news editor of Science. During this major AAAS event, the moderator Tim Appenzeller asked Dr. Mary Voytek about the never publicly acknowledged problem that water presents in trying to get life's compounds to arise naturally. (Tune in on Friday for our Real Science Radio broadcast, 5 p.m. E.T. for when Bob and Fred Williams will have a great time discussing NASA's answer to our question.)
* From rsr.org/abiogenesis...
* Dear NASA, Water is the Enemy of Abiogenesis: Beware the ubiquitous bait-and-switch. Wherever water is found, NASA claims that would be a good place to search for evidence that life may have originated there. Yes, water is needed to maintain life. But as the universal solvent, outside of the controlled environment of a living organism, water relentlessly dissolves the chemical building blocks of life like amino acids, sugars including those of RNA and DNA, as well as all kinds of carbohydrates and countless other polymers. The journal Science stated that "water [is] lethal to the survival of DNA." The same goes for RNA and any fantastical RNA World, as even Stanley Miller, of 1952's Miller-Urey infamy, wrote in PNAS, "Sugars are known to be unstable in strong acid or base [and further] ribose and other sugars have surprisingly short half-lives for decomposition at neutral pH, making it very unlikely that sugars were available as prebiotic reagents." Thus monosaccharides and disaccharides, for example, dissolve rapidly. Scientific examination has always readily seen this evident pattern. In 1955, the first known investigation into original biological material remaining in fossils, conducted by the Carnegie Institute, stated, "Ultimately in the presence of water these peptide bonds are broken", peptides being two or more amino acids linked in a chain. As foundational compounds of all living organisms, peptides are significant throughout every cell and are vital in most biological processes. Peptides comprise all proteins, most enzymes, various hormones (including unicellular ones), they transport nutrients and are cellular building blocks. And water dissolves them. Enzymes perform and vastly speed up the chemical reactions necessary for life yet water destroys both peptide and non-peptide Ribosome enzymes (which are not made from amino acids but from RNA). Thus NASA, the BBC, ESA, Nova, and science educators like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, ubiquitously use a bait-and-switch to manipulate their audiences. Whereas molecules like DNA and RNA easily dissolve in water (including by deamination and depurination), materialists exploit their audiences' gullibility and ignorance, along with water's known role in sustaining life, to pretend that it is an unquestioned asset for abiogenesis, to form life from the very chemical compounds that it would disassemble. And of course, because life is information-based, even more so than it is carbon-based, abiogenesis is impossible anyway. So, while it helps to maintain existing life, NASA, water is the enemy of "prebiotic" molecules.
* See More at rsr.org/bb: Where we also embed and sell DVDs and Blu-rays of our full-length video against the big bang theory...
* All of Which, NASA, Brings Us To This: Life is the only thing in the cosmos aware of the cosmos' existence. And because life is a part of the cosmos, any proposed history including the "standard model" of big bang cosmology that cannot account for the origin of life is a failed model. Mainstream astronomy, origin-of-life, and cosmology institutions point to the presence of water, ironically, as a primary factor in the origin of life. However, as with hundreds of other materialist chicken and egg problems, water is essential for life but would prevent the origin of life. So, even if abiogenesis were possible, water would be one of its greatest barriers. What this peculiar situation indicates is that the standard model provides no help in explaining our origins. Thus, as Bob Enyart's presentation in Malibu at Pepperdine University demonstrations, there are no secular theories of origins. God exists. They don't.