Re: News: Without enzyme, biological reaction essential to life takes 2.3 billion years

From: "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rston...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In 1995, Wolfenden reported that without a particular enzyme, a
biological transformation he deemed "absolutely essential" in
creating the building blocks of DNA and RNA would take 78 million
years. ... Enzymes can make that reaction happen in milliseconds.

That's an overstatement. All he's shown is that without that enzyme
or some feeble substitute that particular reaction would take a
minute instead of a few milliseconds to half-complete the reaction,
and furthermore that particular reaction is needed only *today*
using *today's* biochemical pathways to create *today's* necessary
biochemicals. Before the most recent take-over of DNA from RNA,
different chemicals and different biochemical pathways were
necessary, and before the previous take-over probably even more
extremely different chemicals and different pathways were
necessary, and at the start of abiogenesis when the first
high-fecundity replicator chanced into existance most surely a
totally different set of necessary chemicals and pathways were
around. Nothing whatsoever like this current enzyme would have been
necesary or even useful back then. My guess is that formaldehyde
and cyanide where the two most important chemicals back at the
start of replicating organic-chemical systems, because they each
can be formed in large quantities spontaneously by such processes
as UV irradiation and lightening and volcanic vents etc., and each
wrecks havoc in today's systems because they spontaneously catalyze
unwanted reactions, and together they spontaneously synthesize a
form of sugar, one of the building blocks of more complex
biochemicals.

The reaction in question is essential for the biosynthesis of
hemoglobin and chlorophyll,

Neither of which played any role whatsoever until relatively
recently in the natural history of life on Earth, as measured by
successive takeovers, such as: clayCrystals with crystal
micro-shape as key phoenotype variation -> formaldehyde + cyanide
etc. in auto-catalytic chemical sets with food-web ecological
evolution catalyzed by symbiotic clayCrystal micro-shapes ->
cellular micro-ecologies of replicators of both biochemical and
clayCrystal symbiotes, with set-theoretic evolution -> polymeric
replicators with adjacency effects yielding immense potential
variation far beyond set-theoretic limits -> primitive
twisted/selfBound-RNA enzymes -> RNA replicase so that RNA can now
completely replace the previous genome -> RNA-to-amino-acid coding
so that both RNA enzymes and protein enzymes can be produced with
full variational possibilities -> DNA->RNA->amino-acid coding as we
have at present mixed with some of two previous stages not yet
extinct.

"This enzyme is essential for both plant and animal life on the planet,"

Each of which is **very** recent, billions of years after the last
big takeover, namely RNA -> DNA. About half a billion years before
the next big takeoer, namely DNA -> cyber. (Whether cyber will
render *all* bio-life extinct, as bio-life rendered clayCrystals
extinct, or cyber will co-exist in symbiosis with bio-life, as
DNA->RNA->aa co-exists with RNA->aa and RNA-selfBond/Twist-enzymes
today, is an open question.)

"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome, that
the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction
half-life of 2.3 billion years."

It's not an obstacle at all when you realize the paradigm of the
previous type of life acting as a "scaffold" to construct the next
type of life which then drives the previous kind of life to
extinction in some cases and endosymbiosis in other cases in what
we call a "take-over".

"Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans,"

Bull***, at least in the sense of the word "catalyst" obviously
intended here! There'd be plenty of earlier forms of life, without
anything that author would admit was a "catalyst", until microbes
got invented and took over the ecosystem. And if he accepts that
formaldehyde is a "catalyst", then his point is moot because
formaldehyde *always* existed on Earth (at least after the first
water condensed).

"It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way
as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive
catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction."

Given what I said above, this remark is too stupid to deserve a reply.
Excercise for any novice, figure out what's so stupid about what he said.

"Enzymes that do a prodigious job of catalysis are, hands-down,
the most sensitive targets for drug development," Wolfenden said.

This is the only new and interesting thing he's said so-far.

OT:
Comment:
From this news I conclude that political speeches definitely need
more enzymes.

Enzymes, or maybe just lubrication would be sufficient to make
political speeches coast to the end fast enough to avoid listeners
falling asleep or switching channels. Maybe political speeches
should be written like well-organized Web pages, where all you need
to read is the table of contents and then you can select which
sections to read in more detail. Instead of a two-hour speech, how
about a 2-minute list of major topics and brief summaries with URL
for getting more info shown at bottom of screen during each
20-second section. Or have the URL of the overall Web site shown at
top and scrolling the *actual* Web-site table of contents (like
Mitch Miller sing-along, current line of song i.e. topic
highlighted) to match the verbal summaries.
* Cure for financial crisis: Purchase newly-issued preferred stock
to provide extra funds to banks/companies. Purchase foreclosed
homes and rent back to original residents.
* Cure for for suffering caused by recession: Provide a combination
of Depression-era WPA and modern InterNet-WPA as guaranteed
employer of last resort at minimum wage. Issue "labor stamps",
analagous to food stamps, which can be used to pay *only*
minimum-wage portion of domestic labor cost of products and
services, and "housing stamps" likewise.
* Cure for global warming: Use Richfield(ARCO)/Maas process to
generate methane from biomass under Antarctic ice. Dump safe
refuse along coastlines to build up level of land to match
rising sealevel. Build infrastructure in space to use Lunar and
asteroidal resources for space manufacturing, and use that
capability to build sun-screen to slightly reduce total light
falling on Earth, converting that intercepted solar energy into
electricity to beam to Earth in lieu of burning organic
reserves.
* Cure for terrorism: Expand InterNet-WPA to include all countries
of the world, so that everyone can work for a decent standard of
living instead of getting so desperate/fruistrated as to turn to
terrorism.
* Cure for ongoing mass extinction: Pay one percent of the
population to each "adopt" a species of life in groups of five
people for each species, by learning about it and how to protect
it from extinction, thus protecting each of 14 million species
from extinction, and incidentally saving the poorest one percent
of the population from poverty and resultant starvation+cholera.
* Cure for spam and overburdening of popular people: Use Turing
test to filter out spamBotNets and dDOSbotets, and use
reverse-tree of LinkedIn/SixDegreesOfSeparation-style
connections to filter ideas from many people to each one popular
person and to provide prompt explanations for all rejected ideas.

I tried to suggest some of those ideas to Obama in early January,
by submitting my ideas to his comment form on his Web site, but
instead of reading what I wrote, his staff just harvested my
address to be put on their spam list begging for donations to the
campaign. If he can't prevent his tiny staff from
address-harvesting and spamming, how his he going to prevent his
gigantic military from torturing prisoners of war?

.

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