>> One of the criticisms creationists make about the inorganic origin of
life scenarios is that when amino acids are made in the laboratory they
are 50% left handed and 50% right handed ( a 50-50 ratio is called
racemic). Since a mixture of left and right handed amino acids make
useless proteins and living forms only have left handed proteins, the
problem has been claimed to be fatal to the origin of life scenario. It
has been known for a while that non-racemic amino acids existed in the
Murchison meteorite. <<
Being a lefty, I like the idea of God preferring left handedness. :-)
Presumably a biology based on right handed proteins would be just as
viable.
I don't get it. Even if the reported facts are true, where's the problem?
Imagine what would happen if one could dump a lot of life forms with right
handed proteins into earth's environment. Would they eventually die out
within the current left-handed environment? Seems very likely.
So the issue is whether an evolution-based-origin-of-life scenario could
eventually swing one way or the other, left or right? Surely, there are
good reasons to believe that such a swing would be advantageous to life.
There is an interesting, more perplexing, analogy arising in particle
physics: For some reason, almost all of the matter we see is "matter," not
"antimatter." The two are incompatible, and, by some means, one ("matter")
has won out over the other -- at least in our part of the universe. Is it
possible this choice occurred naturally soon after the Big Bang, under the
guidance of God-given physical laws? Seems plausible to me.
Gordon Simons