A post at PT (go here) claims that recent work supporting a naturalistic origin of single chiral forms for amino acids (as exist in extant organisms and presumably had to occur under prebiotic conditions) constitutes a false positive for the design inference. The post also cites a case of someone using my design inference apparatus to argue for design from homochirality, but I personally have never done so (to the best of my knowledge, you won’t find any mention of “chirality” in the papers on my designinference.com website). Even if this research were entirely successful at showing how to get high concentrations of single chiral forms (at this point the research merely shows a statistically significant bias), it would not challenge the design inference. The reason is that even though homochirality poses an obstacle to a materialistic account of chemical evolution, it’s easy to imagine a filtration mechanism leaving behind homochiral batches of amino acids. But the chirality problem pales in comparison to the problem of sequencing amino acids to form functional proteins. That’s where Steve Meyer and I have always focused our attention. Let the Thumbsmen at PT come up with a plausible mechanism for protein generation along with a detailed account for how this proposed mechanism could generate a modest sized 250-amino acid protein, and I’ll take notice. Until then, indulge your homochiral fantasies.
Homochiral fantasies and the design inference
- Categories
- Intelligent Design