“Thou shalt not use the accursed paragraph.”

“I deeply grieve the death of my friend Dick,

He went through life with a corkscrew prick,

He spent his days on a fruitless whim,

of trying to find a similar quim;

Then, he found one; BUT he fell down dead,

since the damn thing had a left hand thread.”

Right, but the article is not about them. It’s about why amino acids wind to the left based on studies of isovaline in carbon rich meteorites. We’re not going into the level of detail that would apply to nucleotides or any other chemical processes of living things. We have a very narrow focus here.

“What is the message from this article, that life has a bias to the left? That is not true”

We’re talking about a bias to left-handed chirality in amino acids that are vital for life. Nowhere in the post does it say anything about every single molecule in every living thing being left-handed or anything about molecules other than amino acids. A bias means “skew” rather than “only.”

However, if you’re trying to say that life actually doesn’t have left-handed amino acids and the NASA study is wrong, please let me know and point me to where I can find a better source. I just figured that NASA astrobiologists should have a good grip on this whole chirality of amino acids thing.

“Also this article uses a picture of a DNA molecule.normal DNA in the human body is a RIGHT-HANDED helix”

Actually, there are helixes with different handedness out there and this simple graphic seems to be like a Rorschach inkblot. Some people say that it’s wound to the right, you’re saying that it’s wound to the left. It all seems to depend on how it shows up on your monitor and from where you’re picking a starting point for analyzing the direction of the twist.

“author, please get your facts straight before posting an article like this.”

I’ve referenced an official, peer-reviewed NASA study on the subject. I can also provide the announcement page for the study which confirms the basis of the post. All I’ve done was a brief write-up and posit questions about what it could mean for alien life.

Critiques about nucleotides, other molecules and in which exact direction is the DNA molecule in the image wound, are addressing things that were never in the article to begin with.

“I didnt mean for this to sound so contentious, I just think we need to look at this.” Your claim is dishonest because it implies 1) That we haven’t looked into these things 2) That you have actually studied natural selection, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, etc.

I can see that this is a thinly veiled attempt to discuss creationism, although I have to admit it was a pleasure reading your comment, you write very well. Your questions display a clear lack of understanding of the basic premises of evolution and natural selection.

The selfish gene is a good book to read on natural selection, if that is too advanced you may want to consider taking some biology and chemistry courses. Once you get it, you realize how elegantly simple natural selection is and exactly how it works

Science is looking at the world and saying, “If god didn’t do it, how did it happen?” Lets not mix god with science, we tried that in the dark ages.

Well we’re off on a little Gish Gallop here. The problem with that is that rather than giving the person you’re asking a direct question, you’re flooding the debate with your assumptions and go off on many tangents.

When you have organic chemicals that will interact with one another, they will when the conditions are right. And we’re talking about a minimum time frame of 500 million years. That’s a pretty long time even if it’s just a little part of the planet’s 4.5 billion year history, not a short stretch you’re implying.

The idea of “this stuff coming to life” is somewhat vague because there’s really no clear, definitive line between dead and alive in biology. Viruses are often said to be more like a collection of biochemical shards than living things and yet, they’re also one of the most widespread organisms on Earth. Oh and by the way, they’re made from the same organic compounds that would’ve arrived on those meteors.

All living things are spin offs. In fact, evolution can be thought of as 4 billion years of various spin offs, experiments and branches. Depending on the conditions, most die (over 99 out of 100) and others prosper (less than 1 in 100) so all life we see today is a fraction of a percent of all the biodiversity over the entire history of life. Those duplications you mention are very messy and create countless mutations, enough to start branching out into new species. Evolution is actually a very messy process.

There was no “progenitor” but most likely, a whole series of chemical reactions which eventually lead to a large pool of potential Universal Common Ancestors. Whatever mutations they underwent and how natural selection played out dictated what life we have today.

Finally, if you understand some basics of chemistry, it’s really not so difficult to believe that organic compounds which want to fuse into more complex molecules in an open system such as Earth, would eventually combine into life. In fact, it takes a lot more effort to think that there was an eternal magic being stringing carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms and so on, than just let chemical reactions play themselves out.

The purposeful language about evolution is a very bad habit I’ve written about quite a bit and if you were to ask someone who actually studied evolution with a little but of depth, you wouldn’t get this “design jargon.” It’s a cultural phenomenon which permeates popular science.