Origins of Life
The speaker was introduced by Tom Salamone, director of the Albany chapter of Reasons to Believe. “We seek to integrate the record of nature with the words of the bible,” said Salamone.
Rana started the presentation with information about how cells come to be, and the definition of life.
He said that there are four characteristics of life. Life needs to be made up of highly organized matter, have chemically distinct compositions from the environment, be able to respond to stimuli, and be able to reproduce.
“These are what scientists are trying to accomplish when they create life in the lab, organisms or entities that have as many of these properties as possible,” said Rana.
Rana said that in order to create artificial life in a lab, certain enzymes need to be produced, and also an active site.
The complete process requires chemists, engineers, biochemists, and molecular biologists, a team of 20 researchers, hundreds of dollars of computer time, elements from nature, and sophisticated instruments to produce a single enzyme.
“If it takes this much effort to create a single enzyme, again is this not evidence for what it’s required for life to come from simple chemical entities? I believe that this work does anything other than demonstrate the validity of the evolutionary paradigm,” said Rana.
Rana showed how recent scientists are able to identify chemical reactions for the building blocks of life, bio polymers to evolve to functional molecules, and self-replicating systems.
“You have to show that these processes happened in the conditions of the early earth. To show that it is geochemically plausible, I believe that this is where origins of life researchers have failed,” said Rana.