How many fascinating analogs exist for this problem?
"...the corrosion on the glass also forms millions of tiny pits. The authors think those pits could serve as tiny reaction chambers..."
In other words, the experimental conditions, as intended, were almost "too perfect." The simulation of reality requires some amount of unspecified noise with respect to CONDITIONS, in this case, corroded glass.
How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?
I'm not aware of any bench experiment that eliminates all noise (I think that would be physically impossible) but we can certainly isolate things from the external environment very well, and the physical results you get from those tend to be very "clean" (IE, if you're measuring a physical parameter which is required to be an integer, and computing a mean on your observed values, the mean will be near the integer and the variance will be tiny compared to the magnitude of the integer.
On the computer, many "experiments" (really simulations) are 100% deterministic and therefore have perfectly predictable noise characteristics. Most simulations are not deterministic for a wide range of engineering reasons (order of summation in a distributed environment, inability to specify random seed) but are nondeterministic in a statistically useful way (IE, you can run a few times and get a good idea of the real result).
> How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?
All of them, approximately. There are a few journals like http://www.orgsyn.org/ that consist entirely of rigorously vetted methods, but that is definitely an outlier. The significance of the noise will depend on the specifics, of course.
I'm fairly sure there have been a few high profile retractions of 'metal-free catalysis' that were ultimately traced to metal impurities in the reagents. There was also an incident with the DOE where in the process of refurbishing some of the nuclear arsenal they found that they couldn't reproduce one of the necessary ingredients due to some then unknown change. I am blanking on the (code)name of the material they were trying to reproduce though.
You're thinking of FOGBANK. Apparently they needed some of the impurities present in the original manufacturing runs to get the properties they wanted. Restarting FOGBANK production was problematic because a) the manufacturing process is in itself tricky and nasty and then b) once they restarted it they discovered the previously overlooked impurities.
So the new experiment has three flasks. One is borosilicate, the other two are teflon. One of the teflon flasks has pieces of borosilicate floating in it. Both the teflon flasks failed to reproduce the results of the original experiment.
Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?
The takeaway is that the silica / silicate in the glass acted as the silica in the rocks and gave a more closer to real-life scenario, so it solidifies the original experiment even more, while noting that the original authors did not intend this.
what I mean is, how do they know that's what helped the reaction? The other two flasks were of a different material, but the same as each other. How do they know that material A aided the reaction as opposed to concluding that material B impeded it?
I might have missed something. says the teflon flasks produced less organic material, but I assumed it was only the teflon without borosilicate? my understanding was that borosilicate contributed to creation of organic materials.
Article Quote:
When Miller showed his results to Urey, the latter suggested a paper should be published as soon as possible. (Urey was senior but generously declined to be listed as co-author, lest this lead to Miller getting little to no credit for the work.)
As if Urey doesn't deserve enough respect, the story is better than described:
Sub-article Quote:
After Miller showed the impressive results to Urey, they decided to submit them to Science. Urey
declined Miller’s offer to coauthor the report because otherwise Miller would receive little or no credit. Knowing that a graduate student could have a difficult time getting a paper like this published, Urey contacted the Science editorial office to explain the importance of the work and ask that the paper be published as soon as possible. Urey kept mentioning the results in his lectures, drawing considerable attention from the news media.
The manuscript was sent to Science in early February of 1953. Several weeks went by with no news. Growing impatient, Urey wrote to Howard Meyerhoff, chairman of AAAS’s Editorial Board, on 27 February to complain about the lack of progress. Then, on 8 March 1953, the New York Times reported in a short article entitled, “Looking Back Two Billion Years” that W. M. MacNevin and his associates at Ohio State University had performed several experiments simulating the primitive Earth—including a discharge experiment with methane wherein “resinous solids too complex for analysis” were produced. The next day, Miller sent Urey a copy of the clipping with a note saying “I am not sure what should be done now, since their work is, in essence, my thesis. As of today, I have not received the proof from Science, and in the letter that was sent to you, Meyerhoff said that he had sent my note for review.”
Infuriated by this news, Urey had Miller withdraw the paper and submit it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Ironically, at the same time (11 March), Meyerhoff, evidently frustrated by Urey’s actions, wrote to Miller that he wanted to publish the manuscript as a lead article and that he wanted Miller—not Urey—to make the final decision about the manuscript. Miller immediately accepted Meyerhoff’s offer, the paper was withdrawn from the Journal of the American Chemical Society and returned to Science, and was published on 15 May 1953.
> Most ancient recipes call for whole small fatty fish to be layered between herbs and salt in concrete vats. Palacios’ team used large glass fermenting vessels.
There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....
Except, great irony, in TFA, it was the glass vessels and not the other ones which had bits of the walls going into solution and helping to make the other amino acids. Eventually perhaps giving rise to oak trees. Doesnt look like it to a lowly primate, but glass has a hallowed place in the cosmos, cherry oak is a fucking upstart
I don't know if people gloss over it, or it's just a good place to start. It's like if you were wondering how a giant Lego set came to be, you might start with the pieces.
I think an analogy would be we created some of the lego blocks in this experiment but a single cell would be akin to all the lego creations in the world.
TL;DR summary: The actual glass the lab flasks were made of mattered.
Miller's lab flasks were made of borosilicate glass and this caused more organic compounds to form than a more truly inert Teflon flask. But Earth's crust is over 90% silicates which could have similarly contributed to the formation of organic compounds in ancient pre-life earth.
I thought the more important fact was that the original experiment produced a bigger variety of aminos than previously thought, discovered by re-examining the original material with modern tech.
We have such a limited understanding of life that calling it “just” anything, at least with any degree of confidence, seems unfounded.
Our definitions are somewhat inadequate and full of edge cases and blurred lines. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them out of hand, especially since the circumstances of life’s origin are so mistifying.
It s not mistifying that much if you look at the chemical timescale. Give me 2 bn years and see where I go. Try to imagine what that amount of time for random permutation can give in the entire space of the universe and you're bound to have a self reproducing machine popping up once.
The philosophical name for this concept is panpsychism.
Personally, I’m a panentropist (my own creation) - I hold that the spectrum of life/consciousness varies depending on the level of entropy. So a flame has a higher level of consciousness than a piece of paper and oxygen molecules. But when you combine them they increase their level. It’s weird but it might be correct - doesn’t address issues of the hard problem of consciousness however
I didn't say it wasn't useful. My comment is in terms of physics rather than biology or chemistry. i.e. in physics, there is little difference but complexity between a rock and a human.
Since the beginning of time, things merge. Subatomic "particles" into atoms into molecules into bigger molecules, all directed by physics. Biochemistry, is just chemistry, is just physics.
The commenter is likely referring to complexity from simplicity, best shown in Stephen Wolfram's Rule 30. I'll be talking about this topic, and its implications, at length in an upcoming video on https://recursion.is/youtube.
That's a really profound sounding way of saying that life is complex and we don't understand it. Or are you saying that we do understand it? If so I'm sure you're in high demand right now.
this experiment only reduces the uncertaintly that the building blocks are widely available. The big problem wiht this experiment is that it misestimated the nature of the early atmosphere and os they basically simulated another planet. We don't know if any other planets have life, so simulating another planet isn't useful to illuminate anything about life on earth.
It would seem that the next logical experiment is to take Miller-Urey as a given, throw a perfect blend of polymer chains into the "soup," and see if they can start forming RNA chains. I thought I had read about such an experiment, but I can't find a reference to it now. Anything coming up in Google for me is being obfuscated by this recent study, and mRNA COVID vaccine stuff.
I think what the naysayers are missing is that if this experiment had failed to generate any of the sort of organic molecules strongly associated with life, that would have shaken things up - or would you have been just as eager to dismiss this experiment in that case?
I think this is the fallacy of arguing the middle usually deployed against science.
There's a great example of Futurama, where the evolutionary naysayer demands an intermediate form, and Farnsworth shows him one... then he demands another, and Farnsworth shows THAT form... and this cycle repeats hundreds of times until Farnsworth has no intermediate form and the naysayer declares victory.
There is just enormous amounts of shoddy thinking out there from people on the subject of Origin of Life. I'm particularly annoyed by the non sequitur "the universe is large, so there must (with high probability) be life elsewhere." (If anyone reading this thinks that's a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.)
Would you like to say a bit more about why that's not a valid argument. To be clear, I'm not saying it is (I don't know enough about the subject to do so) but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Isn't similar probabilistic reasoning used to explain why evolution by natural selection gives rise to various complex life forms? If so, do you also think that that reasoning is shoddy?
Readit News
In other words, the experimental conditions, as intended, were almost "too perfect." The simulation of reality requires some amount of unspecified noise with respect to CONDITIONS, in this case, corroded glass.
How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?
On the computer, many "experiments" (really simulations) are 100% deterministic and therefore have perfectly predictable noise characteristics. Most simulations are not deterministic for a wide range of engineering reasons (order of summation in a distributed environment, inability to specify random seed) but are nondeterministic in a statistically useful way (IE, you can run a few times and get a good idea of the real result).
All of them, approximately. There are a few journals like http://www.orgsyn.org/ that consist entirely of rigorously vetted methods, but that is definitely an outlier. The significance of the noise will depend on the specifics, of course.
I'm fairly sure there have been a few high profile retractions of 'metal-free catalysis' that were ultimately traced to metal impurities in the reagents. There was also an incident with the DOE where in the process of refurbishing some of the nuclear arsenal they found that they couldn't reproduce one of the necessary ingredients due to some then unknown change. I am blanking on the (code)name of the material they were trying to reproduce though.
Apparently they've resolved that.
Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?
Not the clearest way to phrase it, but I agree it most likely means the loose borosilicate bits worked too.
Dead Comment
Article Quote: When Miller showed his results to Urey, the latter suggested a paper should be published as soon as possible. (Urey was senior but generously declined to be listed as co-author, lest this lead to Miller getting little to no credit for the work.)
As if Urey doesn't deserve enough respect, the story is better than described:
Sub-article Quote: After Miller showed the impressive results to Urey, they decided to submit them to Science. Urey declined Miller’s offer to coauthor the report because otherwise Miller would receive little or no credit. Knowing that a graduate student could have a difficult time getting a paper like this published, Urey contacted the Science editorial office to explain the importance of the work and ask that the paper be published as soon as possible. Urey kept mentioning the results in his lectures, drawing considerable attention from the news media.
The manuscript was sent to Science in early February of 1953. Several weeks went by with no news. Growing impatient, Urey wrote to Howard Meyerhoff, chairman of AAAS’s Editorial Board, on 27 February to complain about the lack of progress. Then, on 8 March 1953, the New York Times reported in a short article entitled, “Looking Back Two Billion Years” that W. M. MacNevin and his associates at Ohio State University had performed several experiments simulating the primitive Earth—including a discharge experiment with methane wherein “resinous solids too complex for analysis” were produced. The next day, Miller sent Urey a copy of the clipping with a note saying “I am not sure what should be done now, since their work is, in essence, my thesis. As of today, I have not received the proof from Science, and in the letter that was sent to you, Meyerhoff said that he had sent my note for review.”
Infuriated by this news, Urey had Miller withdraw the paper and submit it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Ironically, at the same time (11 March), Meyerhoff, evidently frustrated by Urey’s actions, wrote to Miller that he wanted to publish the manuscript as a lead article and that he wanted Miller—not Urey—to make the final decision about the manuscript. Miller immediately accepted Meyerhoff’s offer, the paper was withdrawn from the Journal of the American Chemical Society and returned to Science, and was published on 15 May 1953.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisi...
Deleted Comment
There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....
Miller's lab flasks were made of borosilicate glass and this caused more organic compounds to form than a more truly inert Teflon flask. But Earth's crust is over 90% silicates which could have similarly contributed to the formation of organic compounds in ancient pre-life earth.
Our definitions are somewhat inadequate and full of edge cases and blurred lines. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them out of hand, especially since the circumstances of life’s origin are so mistifying.
Personally, I’m a panentropist (my own creation) - I hold that the spectrum of life/consciousness varies depending on the level of entropy. So a flame has a higher level of consciousness than a piece of paper and oxygen molecules. But when you combine them they increase their level. It’s weird but it might be correct - doesn’t address issues of the hard problem of consciousness however
Dead Comment
Inorganic to organic compounds, sure. But nobody has ever been able to get from there to cells and DNA.
There are several steps to go from no life to life as we know it. This experiment illuminates one of those steps. How is that "nothing"?
There's a great example of Futurama, where the evolutionary naysayer demands an intermediate form, and Farnsworth shows him one... then he demands another, and Farnsworth shows THAT form... and this cycle repeats hundreds of times until Farnsworth has no intermediate form and the naysayer declares victory.
There is just enormous amounts of shoddy thinking out there from people on the subject of Origin of Life. I'm particularly annoyed by the non sequitur "the universe is large, so there must (with high probability) be life elsewhere." (If anyone reading this thinks that's a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.)