bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2007
- Messages
- 36,705
- Gender
- He/Him
- Basic Beliefs
- Strong Atheist
"Lucky" is a movable feast.It's about a somewhat random process.... either the amino acids (or whatever) came from a pool of left-handed molecules - or they were lucky with a "racemic" mixture.I was planning to build a house out of bricks, but unfortunately the local brickworks also manufactures concrete blocks, so I wasn't able to...From a creationist-Experiments have produced amino acids.
Origin of life: the chirality problem
The chirality of the chemical building blocks of life is a huge problem for origin of life scenarios as only optically pure forms such as left-handed amino acidcreation.comBut those experiments would make a mixture of both….All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’.
If I toss a fair coin, and it comes up heads, then a billion years from now people might be astonished that in every single one of the millions of reports about my coin toss, it still came up heads.
But it's not even vaguely surprising.
If amino acids in terrestrial life were all the opposite chirality to that which we observe, then you would be here expressing incredulity that that situation could have happened by chance.
It's the lawyers fallacy.
Here we have a defendant charged with cheating on the lottery. The prosecution lawyer has an airtight case - the chances of picking the correct numbers by chance are so tiny that it's obvious the defendant must be guilty.
But the probability of the lottery being won by someone isn't very small at all. And the only reason that this particular defendant is on trial at all is that he won - if someone else had won, he would be in the dock instead.